CogMap: A cognitive support approach to property and instance alignment

Abstract

The iterative user interaction approach for data integration proposed by Falconer and Noy can be generalized to consider interactions between integration tools (generators) that generate potential schema mappings and users or analysis tools (analyzers) that select the best mapping. Each such selection then provides high-confidence guidance for the next iteration of the integration tool. We have implemented this generalized approach in COGMAP, a matching system for both property and instance alignments between heterogeneous data. The generator in COGMAP uses the instance alignment from the previous iteration to create high-quality property alignments and presents these alignments and their consequences to the analyzer. Our experiments show that multiple iterations as well as the interplay between instance and property alignment serve to improve the final alignments.