Schema Matching Based on Source Codes

Schema matching is a critical step in numerous database applications, such as web data sources integrating, data warehouse loading and information exchanging among several authorities. Existing techniques for schema matching are classified as either schema-based, instance-based, or a combination of both. In this paper, we propose a new class of techniques, called schema matching based on source codes. The idea is to exploit the exterior schema extracted from the source codes to find semantic correspondences between attributes in the schemas to be matched. Essentially, the exterior schema is a schema that is used to be exposed to final users and is in the outermost shell of applications. Thus, it typically contains complete semantics of data, which is very helpful in the solution of schema matching. We present a framework for schema matching based on source codes, which includes three key components: extracting the exterior schema, evaluating the quality of matching and finding the optimal mapping. We also present some helpful features and rules of the source codes for the implementation of each component, and address the corresponding challenges in details.