Resolving Structural Conflicts in the Integration of XML Schemas: A Semantic Approach Xia Yang, Mong-Li Lee, and Tok Wang Ling   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Schema and Ontology Integration Abstract While the Internet has facilitated access to information sources, the task of scalable integration of these heterogeneous data sources remains a challenge. The adoption of the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) as the standard for data representation and exchange has led to an increasing number of XML data sources, both native and non-native. Recent integration work has mainly focused on developing matching techniques to find equivalent elements and attributes among the different XML sources. In this paper, we introduce a semantic approach to resolve structural conflicts in the integration of XML schemas. We employ a data model called the ORA-SS (Object-Relationship-Attribute Model for Semi-Structured Data) to capture the implicit semantics in an XML schema. We present a comprehensive algorithm to integrate XML schemas. Compared to existing methods, our algorithm adopts an n-nary integration strategy that takes into account the data semantics, importance of a source, and how the majority of the sources model their data when resolving structural conflicts such as attribute/object class conflict and ancestor-descendant conflict. Further, redundant object classes and transitive relationship sets are removed to obtain a more concise integrated schema. ©2005 Association for Computing Machinery