A flexible approach for planning schema matching algorithms

Abstract

Most of the schema matching tools are assembled from multiple match algorithms, each employing a particular technique to improve matching accuracy and making matching systems extensible and customizable to a particular domain. The solutions provided by current schema matching tools consist in aggregating the results obtained by several match algorithms to improve the quality of the discovered matches. However, aggregation entails several drawbacks. Recently, it has been pointed out that the main issue is how to select the most suitable match algorithms to execute for a given domain and how to adjust the multiple knobs (e.g. threshold, performance, quality, etc.). In this article, we present a novel method for selecting the most appropriate schema matching algorithms. The matching engine makes use of a decision tree to combine the most appropriate match algorithms. As a first consequence of using the decision tree, the performance of the system is improved since the complexity is bounded by the height of the decision tree. Thus, only a subset of these match algorithms is used during the matching process. The second advantage is the improvement of the quality of matches. Indeed, for a given domain, only the most suitable match algorithms are used. The experiments show the effectiveness of our approach w.r.t. other matching tools. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.