Annotation paths for matching XML-Schem...

Annotation paths are a technique for the semantic annotation of XML-Schemas. The design rationale was to develop an embedded annotation method on top of SAWSDL which is fully declarative, easily applicable and still provides the proper expressiveness for high-quality logic-based schema matching. Annotation paths capture significantly more semantics than plain model references, the declarative annotation method of the W3C standard SAWSDL. While the concept of annotation paths was introduced in earlier works, we provide a new formalization of their structure and based thereon define their semantics and introduce matching methods to derive simple and complex value correspondences. Such correspondences can be used for the generation of executable schema mappings using state of the art mapping tools. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of our annotation method and the proposed matching algorithms using real-world schemas and reference ontologies and demonstrate the feasibility of generating executable mappings using a state of the art mapping system. Our evaluations show that our annotation-based matcher achieves outstanding matching quality (avg. f-measure between 0.98 and 1.0).