Schema Mediation for Heterogeneous XML Schema Sources

Due to the increasingly widespread use of XML, many XML- related applications require the service of schema mediation, which is to find semantically similar elements from two or more schema sources. Current approaches to schema mediation require much improvement. First, they do not cope well with a large number of schemas since most involve repeating pairwise integration. Second, they do not provide sufficiently flexible solution because most mediated schemas commit to some particular choice regarding the representation of relationships between elements. This paper proposes a novel schema mediation approach, called XMediator, to address these problems. It exploits the structural properties of XML schemas, and generates a mediated schema from multiple schema sources. Experimental evaluations on both synthetic and real datasets show the effectiveness of XMediator.