Schema Instance Recoverability: An Approach Centred on the Notion of‘Information Carrying’

摘要

In information systems development,whether the instances of a data schema may be recovered from those of another is a question that may be seen profound for systems design,and yet it does not seem to have been well investigated. In this paper we shed some light on it. In the literature,works that are closest to this question are based upon the notion of 'relevant information capacity',which is concerned with whether one schema may replace another without losing the capacity of the system in storing data. We observe that the rational of such an approach is over intuitive (even though the techniques involved are sophisticated) and we reveal that it is the phenomenon that one or more instances of a schema can tell us truly what an instance of another sachem is that underpins a convincing answer to this question. This is a matter of one thing carrying information about another. However,conventional information theoretic approaches are based upon the notion of entropy and the preservation of it. We observe that schema instance recovery requires looking at much more detailed levels of informational relationships than that,namely random events and particulars of random events.