Automatic Discovery of Semantic Relationships Between Schema Elements

The identification of semantic relationships between schema elements, or schema matching, is the initial step in the integration of data sources. Existing approaches in automatic schema matching have mainly been concerned with discovering equivalence relationships between elements. In this paper, we present an approach to automatically discover richer and more expressive semantic relationships based on a bidirectional comparison of the elements data and metadata. The experiments that we have performed on real-world data sources from several domains show promising results, considering the fact that we do not rely on any user or external knowledge.