Schema Matching for Large-Scale Data Based on Ontology Clustering Method

Holistic schema matching is the process of identifying semantic correspondences among multiple schemas at once. The key challenge behind holistic schema matching lies in selecting an appropriate method that has the ability to maintain effectiveness and efficiency. Effectiveness refers to the quality of matching while efficiency refers to the time and memory consumed within the matching process. Several approaches have been proposed for holistic schema matching. These approaches were mainly dependent on clustering techniques. In fact, clustering aims to group the similar fields within the schemas in multiple groups or clusters. However, fields on schemas contain much complicated semantic relations due to schema level. Ontology which is a hierarchy of taxonomies, has the ability to identify semantic correspondences with various levels. Hence, this study aims to propose an ontology-based clustering approach for holistic schema matching. Two datasets have been used from ICQ query interfaces consisting of 40 interfaces, which refer to Airfare and Job. The ontology used in this study has been built using the XBenchMatch which is a benchmark lexicon that contains rich semantic correspondences for the field of schema matching. In order to accommodate the schema matching using the ontology, a rule-based clustering approach is used with multiple distance measures including Dice, Cosine and Jaccard. The evaluation has been conducted using the common information retrieval metrics; precision, recall and f-measure. In order to assess the performance of the proposed ontology-based clustering, a comparison among two experiments has been performed. The first experiment aims to conduct the ontology-based clustering approach (i.e. using ontology and rule-based clustering), while the second experiment aims to conduct the traditional clustering approaches without the use of ontology. Results show that the proposed ontology-based clustering approach has outperformed the traditional clustering approaches without ontology by achieving an f-measure of 94% for Airfare and 92% for Job datasets. This emphasizes the strength of ontology in terms of identifying correspondences with semantic level variation

Modified Dynamic Time Warping for Hierarchical Clustering

Time series clustering is the process of grouping sequential correspondences in similar clusters. The key feature behind clustering time series data lies on the similarity/distance function used to identify the sequential matches. Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) is one of the common distance measures that have demonstrated competitive results compared to other functions. DTW aims to find the shortest path in the process of identifying sequential matches. DTW relies on dynamic programming to obtain the shortest path where the smaller distance is being computed. However, in the case of equivalent distances, DTW is selecting the path randomly. Hence, the selection could be misguided in such randomization process, which significantly affects the matching quality. This is due to randomization may lead to the longer path which drifts from obtaining the optimum path. This paper proposes a modified DTW that aims to enhance the dynamic selection of the shortest path when handling equivalent distances. Experiments were conducted using twenty UCR benchmark datasets. Also, the proposed modified DTW result has been compared with the state of the art competitive distance measures which is based on precision, recall and f-measure including the original DTW, Minkowski distance measure and Euclidean distance measure. The results showed that the proposed modified DTW reveal superior results in compared to the standard DTW, either using Minkowski or Euclidean. This can demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modification in which optimizing the shortest path has enhanced the performance of clustering. The proposed modified DTW can be used for having good clustering method for any time series data

Clustering Approaches for Multi-source Entity Resolution

Entity Resolution (ER) or deduplication aims at identifying entities, such as specific customer or product descriptions, in one or several data sources that refer to the same real-world entity. ER is of key importance for improving data quality and has a crucial role in data integration and querying. The previous generation of ER approaches focus on integrating records from two relational databases or performing deduplication within a single database. Nevertheless, in the era of Big Data the number of available data sources is increasing rapidly. Therefore, large-scale data mining or querying systems need to integrate data obtained from numerous sources. For example, in online digital libraries or E-Shops, publications or products are incorporated from a large number of archives or suppliers across the world or within a specified region or country to provide a unified view for the user. This process requires data consolidation from numerous heterogeneous data sources, which are mostly evolving. By raising the number of sources, data heterogeneity and velocity as well as the variance in data quality is increased. Therefore, multi-source ER, i.e. finding matching entities in an arbitrary number of sources, is a challenging task. Previous efforts for matching and clustering entities between multiple sources (> 2) mostly treated all sources as a single source. This approach excludes utilizing metadata or provenance information for enhancing the integration quality and leads up to poor results due to ignorance of the discrepancy between quality of sources. The conventional ER pipeline consists of blocking, pair-wise matching of entities, and classification. In order to meet the new needs and requirements, holistic clustering approaches that are capable of scaling to many data sources are needed. The holistic clustering-based ER should further overcome the restriction of pairwise linking of entities by making the process capable of grouping entities from multiple sources into clusters. The clustering step aims at removing false links while adding missing true links across sources. Additionally, incremental clustering and repairing approaches need to be developed to cope with the ever-increasing number of sources and new incoming entities. To this end, we developed novel clustering and repairing schemes for multi-source entity resolution. The approaches are capable of grouping entities from multiple clean (duplicate-free) sources, as well as handling data from an arbitrary combination of clean and dirty sources. The multi-source clustering schemes exclusively developed for multi-source ER can obtain superior results compared to general purpose clustering algorithms. Additionally, we developed incremental clustering and repairing methods in order to handle the evolving sources. The proposed incremental approaches are capable of incorporating new sources as well as new entities from existing sources. The more sophisticated approach is able to repair previously determined clusters, and consequently yields improved quality and a reduced dependency on the insert order of the new entities. To ensure scalability, the parallel variation of all approaches are implemented on top of the Apache Flink framework which is a distributed processing engine. The proposed methods have been integrated in a new end-to-end ER tool named FAMER (FAst Multi-source Entity Resolution system). The FAMER framework is comprised of Linking and Clustering components encompassing both batch and incremental ER functionalities. The output of Linking part is recorded as a similarity graph where each vertex represents an entity and each edge maintains the similarity relationship between two entities. Such a similarity graph is the input of the Clustering component. The comprehensive comparative evaluations overall show that the proposed clustering and repairing approaches for both batch and incremental ER achieve high quality while maintaining the scalability

Local matching learning of large scale biomedical ontologies

Les larges ontologies biomédicales décrivent généralement le même domaine d'intérêt, mais en utilisant des modèles de modélisation et des vocabulaires différents. Aligner ces ontologies qui sont complexes et hétérogènes est une tâche fastidieuse. Les systèmes de matching doivent fournir des résultats de haute qualité en tenant compte de la grande taille de ces ressources. Les systèmes de matching d'ontologies doivent résoudre deux problèmes: (i) intégrer la grande taille d'ontologies, (ii) automatiser le processus d'alignement. Le matching d'ontologies est une tâche difficile en raison de la large taille des ontologies. Les systèmes de matching d'ontologies combinent différents types de matcher pour résoudre ces problèmes. Les principaux problèmes de l'alignement de larges ontologies biomédicales sont: l'hétérogénéité conceptuelle, l'espace de recherche élevé et la qualité réduite des alignements résultants. Les systèmes d'alignement d'ontologies combinent différents matchers afin de réduire l'hétérogénéité. Cette combinaison devrait définir le choix des matchers à combiner et le poids. Différents matchers traitent différents types d'hétérogénéité. Par conséquent, le paramétrage d'un matcher devrait être automatisé par les systèmes d'alignement d'ontologies afin d'obtenir une bonne qualité de correspondance. Nous avons proposé une approche appele "local matching learning" pour faire face à la fois à la grande taille des ontologies et au problème de l'automatisation. Nous divisons un gros problème d'alignement en un ensemble de problèmes d'alignement locaux plus petits. Chaque problème d'alignement local est indépendamment aligné par une approche d'apprentissage automatique. Nous réduisons l'énorme espace de recherche en un ensemble de taches de recherche de corresondances locales plus petites. Nous pouvons aligner efficacement chaque tache de recherche de corresondances locale pour obtenir une meilleure qualité de correspondance. Notre approche de partitionnement se base sur une nouvelle stratégie à découpes multiples générant des partitions non volumineuses et non isolées. Par conséquence, nous pouvons surmonter le problème de l'hétérogénéité conceptuelle. Le nouvel algorithme de partitionnement est basé sur le clustering hiérarchique par agglomération (CHA). Cette approche génère un ensemble de tâches de correspondance locale avec un taux de couverture suffisant avec aucune partition isolée. Chaque tâche d'alignement local est automatiquement alignée en se basant sur les techniques d'apprentissage automatique. Un classificateur local aligne une seule tâche d'alignement local. Les classificateurs locaux sont basés sur des features élémentaires et structurelles. L'attribut class de chaque set de donne d'apprentissage " training set" est automatiquement étiqueté à l'aide d'une base de connaissances externe. Nous avons appliqué une technique de sélection de features pour chaque classificateur local afin de sélectionner les matchers appropriés pour chaque tâche d'alignement local. Cette approche réduit la complexité d'alignement et augmente la précision globale par rapport aux méthodes d'apprentissage traditionnelles. Nous avons prouvé que l'approche de partitionnement est meilleure que les approches actuelles en terme de précision, de taux de couverture et d'absence de partitions isolées. Nous avons évalué l'approche d'apprentissage d'alignement local à l'aide de diverses expériences basées sur des jeux de données d'OAEI 2018. Nous avons déduit qu'il est avantageux de diviser une grande tâche d'alignement d'ontologies en un ensemble de tâches d'alignement locaux. L'espace de recherche est réduit, ce qui réduit le nombre de faux négatifs et de faux positifs. L'application de techniques de sélection de caractéristiques à chaque classificateur local augmente la valeur de rappel pour chaque tâche d'alignement local.Although a considerable body of research work has addressed the problem of ontology matching, few studies have tackled the large ontologies used in the biomedical domain. We introduce a fully automated local matching learning approach that breaks down a large ontology matching task into a set of independent local sub-matching tasks. This approach integrates a novel partitioning algorithm as well as a set of matching learning techniques. The partitioning method is based on hierarchical clustering and does not generate isolated partitions. The matching learning approach employs different techniques: (i) local matching tasks are independently and automatically aligned using their local classifiers, which are based on local training sets built from element level and structure level features, (ii) resampling techniques are used to balance each local training set, and (iii) feature selection techniques are used to automatically select the appropriate tuning parameters for each local matching context. Our local matching learning approach generates a set of combined alignments from each local matching task, and experiments show that a multiple local classifier approach outperforms conventional, state-of-the-art approaches: these use a single classifier for the whole ontology matching task. In addition, focusing on context-aware local training sets based on local feature selection and resampling techniques significantly enhances the obtained results

Context-aware OLAP for textual data warehouses

Decision Support Systems (DSS) that leverage business intelligence are based on numerical data and On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP) is often used to implement it. However, business decisions are increasingly dependent on textual data as well. Existing research work on textual data warehouses has the limitation of capturing contextual relationships when comparing only strongly related documents. This paper proposes an Information System (IS) based context-aware model that uses word embedding in conjunction with agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithms to dynamically categorize documents in order to form the concept hierarchy. The results of the experimental evaluation provide evidence of the effectiveness of integrating textual data into a data warehouse and improving decision making through various OLAP operations

Robust Algorithms for Clustering with Applications to Data Integration

A growing number of data-based applications are used for decision-making that have far-reaching consequences and significant societal impact. Entity resolution, community detection and taxonomy construction are some of the building blocks of these applications and for these methods, clustering is the fundamental underlying concept. Therefore, the use of accurate, robust and scalable methods for clustering cannot be overstated. We tackle the various facets of clustering with a multi-pronged approach described below. 1. While identification of clusters that refer to different entities is challenging for automated strategies, it is relatively easy for humans. We study the robustness of clustering methods that leverage supervision through an oracle i.e an abstraction of crowdsourcing. Additionally, we focus on scalability to handle web-scale datasets. 2. In community detection applications, a common setback in evaluation of the quality of clustering techniques is the lack of ground truth data. We propose a generative model that considers dependent edge formation and devise techniques for efficient cluster recovery

Comparative Analysis of Different Data Representations for the Task of Chemical Compound Extraction

Chemical Compound Extraction refers to the task of recognizing chemical instances such as oxygen nitrogen and others. The majority of studies that addressed the task of chemical compound extraction used machine-learning techniques. The key challenge behind using machine-learning techniques lies in employing a robust set of features. In fact, the literature shows that there are numerous types of features used in the task of chemical compound extraction. Such dimensionality of features can be determined via data representation. Some researchers have used N-gram representation for biomedical-named entity recognition, where the most significant terms are represented as features. Meanwhile, others have used detailed-attribute representation in which the features are generalized. As a result, identifying the best combination of features to yield high-accuracy classification becomes challenging. This paper aims to apply the Wrapper Subset Selection approach using two data representations—N-gram and detailed-attributes. Since each data representation would suit a specific classification algorithm, two classifiers were utilized—Naïve Bayes (for detailed-attributes) and Support Vector Machine (for N-gram). The results show that the application of feature selection using detailed-attributes outperformed that of N-gram representation by achieving a 0.722 f-measure. Despite the higher classification accuracy, the selected features using detailed-attribute representation have more meaning and can be applied for further datasets