An Evidential Approach to Query Interface Matching on the Deep Web

Matching query interfaces is a critical step in data integration across multiple Web databases. The problem is closely related to schema matching that typically exploits different features of schemas. Relying on a particular feature of schemas is not sufficient. We propose an evidential approach to combining multiple matchers using Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence. First, our approach views the match results of an individual matcher as a source of evidence that provides a level of confidence on the validity of each candidate attribute correspondence. Second, it combines multiple sources of evidence to calculate the overall level of confidence, reflecting the match results of different matchers. Third, it selects the top k attribute correspondences of each source attribute from the target schema. Finally it uses some heuristics to resolve any conflicts between the attribute correspondences of different source attributes. Our experimental results show that our approach is highly accurate and effective.