Abstract

Exchanging and integrating data that uses different vocabularies are two prominent problems in the database literature. These problems have been, so far, solved separately, and never been addressed together in a unified setting. In this paper, we propose a class of mappings - called DSE, for data sharing and exchange - that represents this unified setting. We introduce a DSE setting with particular interpretation of related data where ordinary data exchange or data integration cannot be applied. We define the class of DSE solutions in a DSE setting, that allow to store a part of explicit data and a set of inference rules used to generate the complete set of exchanged data. We identify among those a particular DSE solution with good properties; namely, one that contains a minimal amount of explicit data. Finally, we define the set of certain answers to conjunctive queries.