Ontology-Driven Semantic Matches between Database Schemas

Schema matching has been historically difficult to automate. Most previous studies have tried to find matches by exploiting information on schema and data instances. However, schema and data instances cannot fully capture the semantic information of the databases. Therefore, some attributes can be matched to improper attributes. To address this problem, we propose a schema matching framework that supports identification of the correct matches by extracting the semantics from ontologies. In ontologies, two concepts share similar semantics in their common parent. In addition, the parent can be further used to quantify a similarity between them. By combining this idea with effective contemporary mapping algorithms, we perform an ontology-driven semantic matching in multiple data sources. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method successfully identifies higher accurate matches than those of previous works.