A distance-based approach for database re-engineering

We present the UQoRE method which supports database reverse engineering by using a data mining technique. Our approach proposes to mine user queries collected on the database in order to extract a specific distance-based similarity measure between two attributes. Unlike previous propositions which were based on the observation of query structures, we focus on the exploration of a query repository. The objective is to extract semantic links which do not appear obviously from other available information sources and are suggested implicitly in queries by expert users who have acquired a good knowledge of the application context. We focus mainly on the problem of attribute similarity that is quite important for the following reengineering steps according to context-based measures without taking into consideration the naming policy used by database designers