Improving Schema Mapping by Exploiting Domain Knowledge

Christian Drumm holds a diploma degree in computer science and aPhD in economics from the University of Karlsruhe. From 2003to 2008 he worked as Researcher at the SAP Research Center CECKarlsruhe where he was engaged in different EU founded researchas well as SAP internal research projects focusing on datamigration and B2B integration.

This dissertation addresses the problem of semi-automatically creating schema mappings. The need for developing schema mappings is a pervasive problem in many integration scenarios. Although the problem is well-known and a large body of work exists in the area, the development of schema mappings is today largely performed manually in industrial integration scenarios. In this thesis an approach for the semi-automatic creation of schema mappings based on a central ontology is developed. The central ontology stores domain as well as integration knowledge. Using this ontology as a basis, schema mappings of high quality can be created automatically. In summary, the presented results show that by exploiting background knowledge automatic schema mapping can be developed to a level where it is applicable in complex industrial scenarios. Furthermore, novel knowledge collection approaches complimenting the mapping approach by presenting non-intrusive methods for collecting the required background knowledge from business users are presented.