Matcher Composition Methods for Automatic Schema Matching

Abstract

We address the problem of automating the process of deciding whether two data schema elements match (that is, refer to the same actual object or concept), and propose several methods for combining evidence computed by multiple basic matchers. One class of methods uses Bayesian networks to account for the conditional dependency between the similarity values produced by individual matchers that use the same or similar information, so as to avoid overconfidence in match probability estimates and improve the accuracy of matching. Another class of methods relies on optimization switches that mitigate this dependency in a domain-independent manner. Experimental results under several testing protocols suggest that the matching accuracy of the Bayesian composite matchers can significantly exceed that of the individual component matchers, and the careful selection of optimization switches can improve matching accuracy even further. Springer LinkThis work may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part for any commercial purpose. Permission to copy in whole or in part without payment of fee is granted for nonprofit educational and research purposes provided that all such whole or partial copies include the following: a notice that such copying is by permission of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc.; an acknowledgment of the authors and individual contributions to the work; and all applicable portions of the copyright notice. Copying, reproduction, or republishing for any other purpose shall require a license with payment of fee to Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc. All rights reserved. Abstract. We address the problem of automating the process of deciding whether two data schema elements match (that is, refer to the same actual object or concept), and propose several methods for combining evidence computed by multiple basic matchers. One class of methods uses Bayesian networks to account for the conditional dependency between the similarity values produced by individual matchers that use the same or similar information, so as to avoid overconfidence in match probability estimates and improve the accuracy of matching. Another class of methods relies on optimization switches that mitigate this dependency in a domain-independent manner. Experimental results under several testing protocols suggest that the matching accuracy of the Bayesian composite matchers can significantly exceed that of the individual component matchers, and the careful selection of optimization switches can improve matching accuracy even further.

JSON Schemas with Semantic Annotations Supporting Data Translation

“…Matching approaches for annotation paths [17,25] automatically translate the path expressions to complex description logic concepts and perform the matching based on ontological relations between these concepts. In [17] Annotation Path based matching was shown to provide superior matching quality compared with model references pointing to single concepts of a reference ontology and with traditional matching approaches such as [26][27][28][29][30][31].…”