Extensible User-Based XML Grammar Matching

XML grammar matching has found considerable interest recently due to the growing number of heterogeneous XML documents on the web and the increasing need to integrate, and consequently search and retrieve XML data originated from different data sources. In this paper, we provide an approach for automatic XML grammar matching and comparison aiming to minimize the amount of user effort required to perform the match task. We propose an open framework based on the concept of tree edit distance, integrating different matching criterions so as to capture XML grammar element semantic and syntactic similarities, cardinality and alternativeness constraints, as well as data-type correspondences and relative ordering. It is flexible, enabling the user to chose mapping cardinality (1:1, 1:n, n:1, n:n), in comparison with existing static methods (constrained to 1:1), and considers user feedback to adjust matching results to the user’s perception of correct matches. Conducted experiments demonstrate the efficiency of our approach, in comparison with alternative methods.