Mediatability: Estimating the Degree of Human Involvement in XML Schema Mediation

Mediation and integration of data are significant challenges because the number of services on the Web, and heterogeneities in their data representation, continue to increase rapidly. To address these challenges we introduce a new measure, mediatability, which is a quantifiable and computable metric for the degree of human involvement in XML schema mediation. We present an efficient algorithm to compute mediatability and an experimental study to analyze how semantic annotations affect the ease of mediating between two schemas. We validate our approach by comparing mediatability scores generated by our system with user-perceived difficulty. We also evaluate the scalability of our system.