An Instance-based Approach for Matching Export Schemas of Geographical Database Web Services

Abstract. This paper describes a semantic approach for matching export schemas of geographical database Web services, based on the use of a small set of typical instances. The paper also contains an extensive experiment, in the context of two gazetteers, Geonames and the ADL gazetteer, to illustrate the approach. 1. Introduction A database Web service consists of a Web service interface with operations that provide access to a backend database. When a client sends a query to a database Web service, the backend engine submits the query to the backend database, collects the results and delivers them to the client. The export schema describes the subset of the backend database schema that the database Web service makes visible to the clients [Sheth and Larson, 1990]. Usually, the export schema consists of a flat table, which does not have complex dependencies with other elements of the backend database schema. In addition, a Web service typically announces its interfaces using Web Service Definition language – WSDL, a W3C standard. The goal of this paper is to present a semantic approach for matching export schemas of geographical database Web services, based on the use of a small set of typical instances. The paper illustrates the approach with an extensive experiment that uses two gazetteers, Geonames and the ADL gazetteer, an ISO-complaint, pre-defined geographical global schema, and a set of typical geographical locations. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses related work. Section 3 introduces the proposed semantic schema matching approach. Section 4 describes the experiment and discusses open issues. Finally, Section 5 contains the final considerations and suggestions for future work.