An instance-based approach for domain-independent schema matching

The process of schema matching lies at the heart of database applications related to data integration. Many instance-based solutions to the schema matching problem have been proposed. These approaches focus on analyzing the values of attributes especially within the application domain. The approach presented in this paper is a two-step domain-independent schema matching technique. The technique first measures shared information between pair-wise attributes using the concept of mutual information. Next, a graph representation with weighted links is constructed for each input schema. At this stage, schema matching switches to a weighted graph matching problem. At this stage, a graduated assignment algorithm is applied to find the correspondence of vertices between graphs. We perform experiments using two real-world data sets in different application domains to roughly evaluate the performance of this schema matching technique in terms of precision, recall and running time.