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.