An Iterative Approach to Managing Uncertain Mappings in Dataspace Support Platforms

A DataSpace Support Platform (DSSP) is a self-sustained and self-managed system which needs to support uncertainty among its mediated schemas and its schema mappings. Some approaches for managing such uncertainty by assigning probabilities and reliability degrees to schema mappings have been proposed. Unfortunately, the number of mappings self-generated by a DSSP is usually too large and among those possible mappings, some might be totally correct and others partially correct. Therefore, providing probabilities or reliability degrees to the mappings is necessary but not su±cient to resolve uncertainty among them. This paper proposes a stepper-based approach called pos-mapping to managing reliable mappings using possibility theory. Instead of choosing a threshold for managing the reliable mappings, pos-mapping approach orders and divides the set of reliable mappings into subsets of possibility distributions and assigns to each of these subsets a recursive possibility degree function. The recursiveness of the possibility degree function leads to an incremental management of the possibility