The emergence of increasing number of collaborating organizations has made clear the need for supporting interoperability infrastructures, enabling sharing and exchange of data among organizations. Schema matching and schema integration are the crucial components of the interoperability infrastructures, and their semi-automation to interrelate or integrate heterogeneous and autonomous databases in collaborative networks is desired. The Semi-Automatic Schema Matching and INTegration (SASMINT) System introduced in this paper identifies and resolves several important syntactic, semantic, and structural conflicts among schemas of relational databases to find their likely matches automatically. Furthermore, after getting the user validation on the matched results, it proposes an integrated schema. SASMINT uses a combination of a variety of metrics and algorithms from the Natural Language Processing and Graph Theory domains for its schema matching. For the schema integration, it utilizes a number of derivation rules defined in the scope of the research work explained in this paper. Furthermore, a derivation language called SASMINT Derivation Markup Language (SDML) is defined for capturing and formulating both the results of matching and the integration that can be further used, for example for federated query processing from independent databases. In summary, the paper focuses on addressing: (1) conflicts among schemas that make automatic schema matching and integration difficult, (2) the main components of the SASMINT approach and system, (3) in-depth exploration of SDML, (4) heuristic rules designed and implemented as part of the schema integration component of the SASMINT system, and (5) experimental evaluation of SASMINT.

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Abstract-Schema matching and schema integration are important components of the data sharing infrastructure in Collaborative Networks. In order to achieve more accurate matching and integration results and enhance efficiency, it is required to provide some mechanisms to carry out these processes as automatically as possible. This paper addresses the problems and challenges related to schema matching and schema integration and introduces the Semi-Automatic Schema Matching and INTegration (SASMINT) system to automate these processes. Other systems aiming at database interoperability typically focus either on schema matching or on schema integration. On the other hand, the SASMINT system combines them and uses the results of schema matching for semi-automatic schema integration. SASMINT follows a composite approach in schema matching, which means it combines the results of variety of algorithms, making it a generic tool applicable for different types of schemas. It also proposes a Sampler component for helping the user to assign the weights to algorithms. Furthermore, SASMINT uses an XML-based derivation language to save the results of schema matching and schema integration, and also to define the components of integrated schemas, in order to further support automated query processing against integrated sources.

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This paper describes the application of the generic framework provided by the Grid·based Virtual Laboratory Amsterdam (VLAM-G). in the support of complex experimentation scenarios in the domain of molecular biology. The focus of the paper lies on both the analysis of some reference experimentation scenarios. and the on-going extension and tuning of Virtual Laboratory environment to better support advanced scientific experiments in this domain.