Injecting Conceptual Constraints into Data Fabrics

Unlike traditional sources managed by DBMSs, data lakes do not provide any guarantee about the quality of the data they store, which can severely limit their use for analysis purposes. The recent notion of data fabric, which introduces a semantic layer allowing uniform access to underlying data sources, makes it possible to tackle this problem by specifying conceptual constraints to which data sources must adhere to be considered meaningful. Along these lines, in this discussion paper, we exploit the data fabric approach by proposing a general methodology for data curation in data fabrics based on: (i) the specification of integrity constraints over a conceptual representation of the data lake and (ii) the automatic translation and enforcement of such constraints over the actual data. We discuss the advantages of this idea and the challenges behind its implementation.