Soundness of Schema Matching Methods

One of the key challenges in the development of open semantic-based systems is enabling the exchange of meaningful information across applications which may use autonomously developed schemata. One of the typical solutions for that problem is the definition of a mapping between pairs of schemas, namely a set of point-to-point relations between the elements of different schemas. A lot of (semi-)automatic methods for generating such mappings have been proposed. In this paper we provide a preliminary investigation on the notion of correctness for schema matching methods. In particular we define different notions of soundness, strictly depending on what dimension (syntactic, semantic, pragmatic) of the language the mappings are defined on. Finally, we discuss some preliminary conditions under which a two different notions of soundness (semantic and pragmatic) can be related. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.