Performance Oriented Schema Matching

Abstract

Semantic matching of schemas in heterogeneous data sharing systems is time consuming and error prone. Existing mapping tools employ semi-automatic techniques for mapping two schemas at a time. In a large-scale scenario, where data sharing involves a large number of data sources, such techniques are not suitable. We present a new robust mapping method which creates a mediated schema tree from a large set of input XML schema trees and defines mappings from the contributing schema to the mediated schema. The result is an almost automatic technique giving good performance with approximate semantic match quality. Our method uses node ranks calculated by pre-order traversal. It combines tree mining with semantic label clustering which minimizes the target search space and improves performance, thus making the algorithm suitable for large scale data sharing. We report on experiments with up to 80 schemas containing 83,770 nodes, with our prototype implementation taking 587 seconds to match and merge them to create a mediated schema and to return mappings from input schemas to the mediated schema.