On Evaluating Schema Matching and Mapping

Abstract

The increasing demand of matching and mapping tasks in modern integration scenarios has led to a plethora of tools for facilitating these tasks. While the plethora made these tools available to a broader audience, it led to some form of confusion regarding the exact nature, goals, core functionalities, expected features, and basic capabilities of these tools. Above all, it made performance measurements of these systems and their distinction a difficult task. The need for design and development of comparison standards that will allow the evaluation of these tools is becoming apparent. These standards are particularly important to mapping and matching system users, since they allow them to evaluate the relative merits of the systems and take the right business decisions. They are also important to mapping system developers, since they offer a way of comparing the system against competitors, and motivating improvements and further development. Finally, they are important to researchers as they serve as illustrations of the existing system limitations, triggering further research in the area. In this work, we provide a generic overview of the existing efforts on benchmarking schema matching and mapping tasks. We offer a comprehensive description of the problem, list the basic comparison criteria and techniques, and provide a description of the main functionalities and characteristics of existing systems.