Schema Matching for Document Exchange: A Constraint Based Approach
Résumé
Information systems’ activities are increasingly becoming distributed. Many systems, therefore, need to exchange documents in order to correctly perform a critical activity. Data stores on the originating and receiving systems rarely have identical structures. As a consequence, document exchange commonly requires that the data be transformed from the originating site, to the document exchange format, and again to the receiving site format. A growing number of document exchange behavior creates new requirements, such as automatically matching document structure, simplifying user’s tasks in creating mappings, and automatically generating data transformation. In our work, we are interested in all these processes: matching, mapping, and data transformation. We propose, in this paper, to extend the XML schema matching used for document exchange to cover constraints management. We show how the constraints improve the performance of schema matching. We also propose XME (XML Mapping Expression) which is an expression model of mappings along with a collection of transformation operators. These extensions take part in our platform for document exchange (ASMADE) that automates matching and generates data transformation instances.