semantic matcher

Schema matching is the task of finding semantic correspondences between elements of two schemas. It is needed in many database applications, such as integration of web data sources, data warehouse loading and XML message mapping. To reduce the amount of user effort as much as possible, automatic approaches combining several match techniques are required. While such match approaches have found considerable interest recently, the problem of how to best combine different match algorithms still requires further work. We have thus developed the COMA schema matching system as a platform to combine multiple matchers in a flexible way. We provide a large spectrum of individual matchers, in particular a novel approach aiming at reusing results from previous match operations, and several mechanisms to combine the results of matcher executions. We use COMA as a framework to comprehensively evaluate the effectiveness of different matchers and their combinations for real-world schemas. The results obtained so far show the superiority of combined match approaches and indicate the high value of reuse-oriented strategies.