Analyzing and revising data integration schemas to improve their matchability

Data integration systems often provide a uniform query interface, called a mediated schema, to a multitude of data sources. To answer user queries, such systems employ a set of semantic matches between the mediated schema and the data-source schemas. Finding such matches is well known to be difficult. Hence much work has focused on developing semi-automatic techniques to efficiently find the matches. In this paper we consider the complementary problem of improving the mediated schema, to make finding such matches easier. Specifically, a mediated schema S will typically be matched with many source schemas. Thus, can the developer of S analyze and revise S in a way that preserves S's semantics, and yet makes it easier to match with in the future? In this paper we provide an affirmative answer to the above question, and outline a promising solution direction, called mSeer. Given a mediated schema S and a matching tool M, mSeer first computes a matchability score that quantifies how ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: PVLDB
• Authors: Xiaoyong Chai, Mayssam Sayyadian, AnHai Doan, Arnon Rosenthal, Len Seligman
• Keywords: Data Integration Systems, Mediated Schema, PVLDB 2008, Uniform Query Interface