Today's database engineers are committed to the reuse of data, for performance and economic reasons. Moreover, they often have to complement enterprise data with data from external sources, where the corresponding semantics is rarely fully available. As a consequence, both database researchers and practitioners are facing salient issues in the discovery and understanding of the semantics hidden in various forms of external sources: data sets, data stores formats, database schemes, application programs, documentation etc. This book focuses on such issues from the perspective of database semantics, discussing theories, principles and models for recovering, representing and organizing semantic information on application data.
