MAXSM: A Multi-Heuristic Approach to XML Schema Matching

Transformation of business messages from one trading partner’s definition to another, or from one business message type to another is a common requirement for enterprise data integration applications. Transforming these business messages entails resolving issues of structural and semantic heterogeneity between their schemas. In this paper, we propose an automatic schema matching approach called MAXSM, designed specifically for matching schemas in the context of enterprise data integration. MAXSM is a multi-heuristic schema matcher which employs, amongst other heuristics, a novel heuristic using WordNet for determining natural-language semantic similarity between schemas. MAXSM also introduces “transitive mappings” that can be discovered from known mappings and used to seed production of candidate mappings. We present a cogent tree spanning approach to search two schemas more effectively for node-level match candidates.