Semantic Similarity Relations and Computation in Schema Integration

Schema integration plays an important part in research areas of heterogeneous information systems and semantic interoperability. How to acquire data semantic knowledge from the local schemas, and how to represent the knowledge acquired in support to the schema integration process are two major problems in schema integration research. To find similarities between objects of different schemata at the semantic level is considered to be one of the crucial problems in schema integration. In order to identify such similarities it is necessary to form a set of semantic characteristics the objects may possess. In this paper, we present a set of such characteristics and a set of semantic similarity relations. The relations are classified into four groups, weak semantic relation, compatible semantic relation, equivalence semantic relation and mergeable semantic relation. In addition, based on the semantic similarity relations, we attempt to find semantic similarity between entities compared and compute their semantic similarity degrees (SSD). We also propose a schema integration tool, which makes use of the semantic relations to integrate objects of different schemata.