Applying Cognitive Principles of Similarity to Data Integration - The Case of SIAM

Increasingly, modern system design is concerned with the integration of legacy systems and data. Consequently, data integration is an important step in many system design projects and also a prerequisite to data warehousing, data mining, and analytics. The central step in data integration is the identification of similar elements in multiple data sources. In this paper, we describe an application of principles of similarity based in cognitive psychology, specifically the theory of Similarity as Interactive Activation and Mapping (SIAM) to the problem of database schema matching. In a field that has been dominated by a multitude of ad-hoc algorithms, cognitive principles can establish an appropriate theoretical basis. The results of this paper show initial success in matching applications and point towards future research.