SMAT: An Attention-based Deep Learning Solution to the Automation of Schema Matching

Jing Zhang, Bonggun Shin, Jinho D. Choi, Joyce C. Ho


Abstract

Schema matching aims to identify the correspondences among attributes of database schemas. It is frequently considered as the most challenging and decisive stage existing in many contemporary web semantics and database systems. Low quality algorithmic matchers fail to provide improvement while manually annotation consumes extensive human efforts. Further complications arise from data privacy in certain domains such as healthcare, where only schema-level matching should be used to prevent data leakage. For this problem, we propose SMAT, a new deep learning model based on state-of-the-art natural language processing techniques to obtain semantic mappings between source and target schemas using only the attribute name and description. SMAT avoids directly encoding domain knowledge about the source and target systems, which allows it to be more easily deployed across different sites. We also introduce a new benchmark dataset, OMAP, based on real-world schema-level mappings from healthcare domain. Our extensive evaluation on a variety of benchmark datasets demonstrate the potential of SMAT to help automate schema-level matching tasks.

Venue / Year

Proceedings of the European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS) / 2021

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