Discovering complex matchings across web query interfaces: a correlation mining approach

To enable information integration, schema matching is a critical step for discovering semantic correspondences of attributes across heterogeneous sources. While complex matchings are common, because of their far more complex search space, most existing techniques focus on simple 1:1 matchings. To tackle this challenge, this paper takes a conceptually novel approach by viewing schema matching as correlation mining, for our task of matching Web query interfaces to integrate the myriad databases on the Internet. On this "deep Web," query interfaces generally form complex matchings between attribute groups (e.g., [author] corresponds to [first name, last name] in the Books domain). We observe that the co-occurrences patterns across query interfaces often reveal such complex semantic relationships: grouping attributes (e.g., [first name, last name]) tend to be co-present in query interfaces and thus positively correlated. In contrast, synonym attributes are negatively correlated because they rarely co-occur. This insight enables us to discover complex matchings by a correlation mining approach. In particular, we develop the DCM framework, which consists of data preparation, dual mining of positive and negative correlations, and finally matching selection. Unlike previous correlation mining algorithms, which mainly focus on finding strong positive correlations, our algorithm cares both positive and negative correlations, especially the subtlety of negative correlations, due to its special importance in schema matching. This leads to the introduction of a new correlation measure, $H$-measure, distinct from those proposed in previous work. We evaluate our approach extensively and the results show good accuracy for discovering complex matchings.