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For example, consider a database of electronic health records. Such a database could contain tables like the following: A doctor table with information about physicians. A patient table for medical subjects undergoing treatment. An appointment table with an entry for each hospital visit. Natural relationships exist between these entities:
Object–relational mapping (ORM, O/RM, and O/R mapping tool) in computer science is a programming technique for converting data between a relational database and the memory (usually the heap) of an object-oriented programming language. This creates, in effect, a virtual object database that can be used from within the programming language.
In SQL (Structured Query Language), the term cardinality refers to the uniqueness of data values contained in a particular column (attribute) of a database table. The lower the cardinality, the more duplicated elements in a column. Thus, a column with the lowest possible cardinality would have the same value for every row.
The W3C introduced R2RML as a standard for mapping data in a relational database to data expressed in terms of the Resource Description Framework (RDF). In the future, tools based on semantic web languages such as RDF, the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and standardized metadata registry will make data mapping a more automatic process.
The terms schema matching and mapping are often used interchangeably for a database process. For this article, we differentiate the two as follows: schema matching is the process of identifying that two objects are semantically related (scope of this article) while mapping refers to the transformations between the objects.
The database schema is the structure of a database described in a formal language supported typically by a relational database management system (RDBMS). The term " schema " refers to the organization of data as a blueprint of how the database is constructed (divided into database tables in the case of relational databases ).
Concept of a mapping table An associative (or junction) table maps two or more tables together by referencing the primary keys (PK) of each data table. In effect, it contains a number of foreign keys (FK), each in a many-to-one relationship from the junction table to the individual data tables.
An object–relational database (ORD), or object–relational database management system (ORDBMS), is a database management system (DBMS) similar to a relational database, but with an object-oriented database model: objects, classes and inheritance are directly supported in database schemas and in the query language.