Schema label normalization for improving schema matching

Schema matching is the problem of finding relationships among concepts across heterogeneous data sources that are heterogeneous in format and in structure. Starting from the “hidden meaning” associated with schema labels (i.e. class/attribute names) it is possible to discover relationships among the elements of different schemata. Lexical annotation (i.e. annotation w.r.t. a thesaurus/lexical resource) helps in associating a “meaning” to schema labels. However, the performance of semi-automatic lexical annotation methods on real-world schemata suffers from the abundance of non-dictionary words such as compound nouns, abbreviations, and acronyms. We address this problem by proposing a method to perform schema label normalization which increases the number of comparable labels. The method semi-automatically expands abbreviations/acronyms and annotates compound nouns, with minimal manual effort. We empirically prove that our normalization method helps in the identification of similarities among schema elements of different data sources, thus improving schema matching results.