PLASMA: A Platform for Schema Matching and Management

This paper introduces an XML Schema management platform that promotes the use of matching techniques to fulfill the requirements of data integration and data exchange. The existing platforms, in the market, deal only with graphical but not automatic matching. Several matching algorithms were suggested, by different researchers, to automate the correspondences discovery between XML Schemas. These algorithms use a wide range of approaches and matching techniques with systematically many parameters and weights to be adjusted manually. In our platform (PLASMA) we suggest a matching algorithm that uses constraints and a combination of structural and description matching. In addition to our innovative matching algorithm, we adopt an automating tuning for the various structural parameters used and propose a Mapping Expression model along with a collection of transformation operators. Hence, PLASMA enables a semantic matching process followed by a visual mapping process to optimize the translation process between exchanged documents or