An MAS negotiation support tool for schema matching

Database schema matching is the process of establishing correspondences between attributes of schemas for data integration purpose. Though various commercial tools have been developed, their results are inherently uncertain. In practice, to obtain correct attribute correspondences, there is a need for collecting human input, after the use of automatic matching tools, to reconcile erroneous mappings. We present a negotiation support tool that enables not a single expert but an expert team, whose members might have conflicting views, can work collaboratively to reconcile the output of the automatic tools. In an attempt to facilitate and support cooperation in team integration, our tool sets the goal to compute all possible decisions from expert inputs as well as explanations for each decision. Moreover, it also shows the foreseeable consequences of choosing a particular decision. Technically, this tool is developed on top of an argumentation framework.