Discovering Concept Mappings by Similarity Propagation among Substructures

Abstract

Concept matching is important when heterogeneous data sources are to be merged for the purpose of knowledge sharing. It has many useful applications in areas such as schema matching, ontology matching, scientific knowledge management, e-commerce, enterprise application integration, etc. With the desire of knowledge sharing and reuse in these fields, merging commonly occurs among different organizations where the knowledge describing the same domain is to be matched. Due to the different naming conventions, granularity and the use of concepts in different contexts, a semantic approach to this problem is preferred in comparison to syntactic approach that performs matches based upon the labels only. We propose a concept matching method that initially does not consider labels when forming candidate matches, but rather utilizes structural information to take the context into account and detect complex matches. Real world knowledge representations (schemas) are used to evaluate the method.