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Summarizing Large-Scale Database Schema Using Community Detection

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Abstract

Schema summarization on large-scale databases is a challenge. In a typical large database schema, a great proportion of the tables are closely connected through a few high degree tables. It is thus difficult to separate these tables into clusters that represent different topics. Moreover, as a schema can be very big, the schema summary needs to be structured into multiple levels, to further improve the usability. In this paper, we introduce a new schema summarization approach utilizing the techniques of community detection in social networks. Our approach contains three steps. First, we use a community detection algorithm to divide a database schema into subject groups, each representing a specific subject. Second, we cluster the subject groups into abstract domains to form a multi-level navigation structure. Third, we discover representative tables in each cluster to label the schema summary. We evaluate our approach on Freebase, a real world large-scale database. The results show that our approach can identify subject groups precisely. The generated abstract schema layers are very helpful for users to explore database.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information, Renmin University of China, Beijing, 100872, China

    Xue Wang & Shan Wang (Senior Member, CCF, Member, ACM)

  2. Key Laboratory of Data Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, Renmin University of China, Beijing, 100872, China

    Xuan Zhou & Shan Wang (Senior Member, CCF, Member, ACM)

Authors
  1. Xue Wang
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  2. Xuan Zhou
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  3. Shan Wang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xue Wang.

Additional information

This work is partly supported by the “HGJ” National Science and Technology Major Project of China under Grant No. 2010ZX01042-001-002, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61070054, the National High Technology Research and Development 863 Program of China under Grant No. 2009AA01Z149, the Research Funds of Renmin University of China under Grant No. 10XNI018 and the Postgraduate Science & Research Funds of Renmin University of China under Grant No. 12XNH177.

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Wang, X., Zhou, X. & Wang, S. Summarizing Large-Scale Database Schema Using Community Detection. J. Comput. Sci. Technol. 27, 515–526 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-012-1240-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-012-1240-1

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