Understanding relationships: Classifying verb phrase semantics

Relationships are an essential part of the design of a database because they capture associations between things. Comparing and integrating relationships from heterogeneous databases is a difficult problem, partly because of the nature of the relationship verb phrases. This research proposes a multi-layered approach to classifying the semantics of relationship verb phrases to assist in the comparison of relationships. The first layer captures fundamental, primitive relationships based upon well-known work in data abstractions and conceptual modeling. The second layer captures the life cycle of natural progressions in the business world. The third layer reflects the context-dependent nature of relationships. Use of the classification scheme is illustrated by comparing relationships from various application domains with different purposes.