Patent ID: 7206785

Claim:
A method for estimating impact in a computer system, comprising: extracting a first metadata descriptor from a first database, wherein the first metadata descriptor and the first database are stored in a data store on a computer system and wherein the first metadata descriptor describes customer information in an organization; comparing the first metadata descriptor to a second metadata descriptor, wherein the second metadata descriptor is stored in the data store in the computer system and describes the customer information in an organization and wherein the second metadata descriptor includes a table and a plurality of tokens, wherein each of the plurality of tokens comprises a portion of a field name in the table; and determining an impact rating between the first metadata descriptor and the second metadata descriptor wherein the impact rating predicts an indication of similarity between the first metadata descriptor and the second metadata descriptor in a plurality of databases in the computer system, wherein determining the impact rating comprises: calculating a relative strength of an entity relationship (rsER) between the first metadata descriptor and the second metadata descriptor; calculating a relative strength of an attribute relationship (rsAttr) between the first metadata descriptor and the second metadata descriptor, wherein said step of calculating a relative strength of the attribute relationship between the first metadata descriptor and the second metadata descriptor further comprises: calculating a relative strength of the attribute relationship considering the relative strength of the entity relationship (rsAttr) between the first metadata descriptor and the second metadata descriptor; and calculating a relative strength of the attribute relationship without considering the relative strength of the entity relationship (rsAttr*) between the first metadata descriptor and the second metadata descriptor; and calculating a relative strength of a mapping (RsMap) between the first metadata descriptor and the second metadata descriptor, wherein RsMap is calculated using the formula: RsMap = 4 ⁢ ( rsER ) + 2 ⁢ ( rsAttr ) + rs ( Attr ⁢ *) 7 and wherein RsMap is the impact rating between the first metadata descriptor and the second metadata descriptor; and saving the impact rating.