some work in designing entity-relation schemas

This is about schemas for describing data shared between applications, was
developed as part of WinFS for Longhorn though this part of it wasn't eventually
actually included in Vista.

I think I can download the full paper if anyone wants it.

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1247480.1247532

Compiling mappings to bridge applications and databases
  International Conference on Management of Data archive
  Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of
  Beijing, China
  SESSION: Data cleaning and integration table of contents
  Pages: 461 - 472  
  Year of Publication: 2007
  ISBN:978-1-59593-686-8
  Authors   
  Sergey Melnik    Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA
  Atul Adya    Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA
  Philip A. Bernstein    Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA

  ABSTRACT

  Translating data and data access operations between applications and databases
  is a longstanding data management problem. We present a novel approach to this
  problem, in which the relationship between the application data and the
  persistent storage is specified using a declarative mapping, which is compiled
  into bidirectional views that drive the data transformation engine. Expressing
  the application model as a view on the database is used to answer queries,