System and method for sharing data between hierarchical databases

Claim 3

The method of claim 1 , further comprising manually defining, configuring and storing mappings between datatype elements.

Claim 4

The method of claim 1 , wherein the step of defining, configuring and storing datatypes comprises reading, writing, and deleting a datatype name, a parent datatype reference, and an element, the element comprising an element name, a datatype reference, a positional reference, an element reference, and an alias name.

Claim 5

The method of claim 1 , wherein the step of defining, configuring and storing hierarchical data structures comprises specifying a parent datatype reference and an element of a datatype having a datatype reference, an element reference and an alias name.

Claim 6

The method of claim 1 , wherein the step of defining, configuring and storing hierarchical data structures comprises nesting datatypes into groups of higher level schema datatypes.

Claim 7

The method of claim 1 , wherein the step of establishing and storing a lineage for linking related datatypes into families comprises locating a common datatype family and locating a common datatype ancestor between a datatype 1 and a datatype 2.

Claim 8

The method of claim 6 , wherein locating a common datatype family between the datatype 1 and the datatype 2 comprises: identifying a root node of a family tree of the datatype 1; identifying a root node of a family tree of the datatype 2; and determining if the root node of datatype 1 is the same as the root node of datatype 2, for indicating a common datatype family.

Claim 9

The method of claim 1 , wherein the step of defining, configuring and storing measures of similarity and similarity match tolerances comprises specifying a comparison algorithm by identifying an algorithm name, an implementation, and implementation parameters.

Claim 10

The method of claim 1 , wherein the step of defining, configuring and storing match strategies comprises specifying comparisons by context, element, data type, and attribute for each of the strategies, and ordering the strategies according to accuracy.

Claim 11

The method of claim 1 , wherein the step of transforming a source hierarchical data structure to a target hierarchical data structure comprises: receiving a source data element from the source hierarchical data structure and a target data element from the target hierarchical data structure; determining whether the source data element has at least one source child data element and the target data element has at least one target child data element; copying the source data element to the target data element if the source data element has no source child data elements and the target data element has no target child data elements; separating the source data element and applying the separated source data element to at least one target child data element if the source data element has no source child data elements and the target data element has at least one target child data element; concatenating the at least one source child data element into one value and applying the one value to the target data element if the source data element has at least one source child data element and the target data element has no target child target data elements; applying a source child data element to a target child data element when the source child data element matches the target child data element if a source data element has at least one source child data element and a target data element has at least one target child data element; and repeating the previous steps until all target data elements have been examined for each of a group of selected strategies.

Claim 12

The method of claim 10 , wherein the step of separating the source data element further comprises separating the source data elements into tokens and applying the tokens to at least one target child data element.

Claim 13

The method of claim 10 , wherein the step of separating the source data element further comprises using a best-fit algorithm to separate and apply the data.

Claim 14

The method of claim 2 , wherein the step of defining, configuring and storing mappings comprises: inputting source and target datatypes and retrieving an associated mapping; inputting source and target datatypes and removing an associated mapping; inputting a mapping specification for storing; and inputting source data schema, target data schema, source data, and target data, and retrieve an associated mapping.

Claim 15

The method of claim 1 , wherein the step of evaluating an effectiveness indicia of match strategies comprises: determining a success value of a context comparison between source and target datatypes based on a mapping between source and target schema; determining a success value of an element comparison between source and target datatypes based on a name comparison of source and target data elements; determining a success value of an attribute comparison between source and target datatypes based on a name comparison of source and target data attributes; determining a success value of a datatype comparison between source and target datatypes based on a lineage comparison of source and target datatypes; determining a success value of a tree structure comparison between source and target datatype tree structures; and aggregating the success values obtained from the comparisons resulting from at least one match strategy to determine an effectiveness indicia for the at least one match strategy.

Claim 16

A computer program embodied on a computer-readable medium incorporating the method of claim 1 .

Claim 19

The system of claim 16 , further comprising at least one match strategy from the tree transformation engine that is stored in the similarity scoring services facility.

Claim 20

The system of claim 16 , further comprising at least one match strategy from the similarity services scoring facility that is provided to the tree transformation engine.

Claim 21

The system of claim 16 , wherein each of the match strategies comprise at least one comparison utility selected from the group consisting of a context comparison utility, an element comparison utility, an attribute comparison utility, a datatype lineage comparison utility, and a datatype tree structure comparison utility.

Claim 22

The system of claim 16 , wherein the match strategies are stored in the similarity scoring services facility in descending order by the effectiveness indicia of each match strategy.

Claim 23

The system of claim 20 , wherein the effectiveness indicia is a match strategy accuracy.

Claim 24

The system of claim 16 , wherein a user may explicitly define a match between datatype elements using the user-defined mapping services facility.