Patent Document ID: 20060136428
Application ID: 11013485
Patent Flag: 0

Claim One:
1. A method of automatically matching schemas comprising: extracting source and target schemas from sources and targets; extracting source and target attributes from said schemas, wherein each source schema will have multiple source attributes and each target schema will have multiple target attributes; representing said source attributes and said target attributes as nodes in a bipartite graph, wherein said bipartite graph has edges between nodes that are related to each other; defining a plurality of similarity scores between each set of related nodes, wherein each of said similarity scores is based on a different context-specific cue of said attributes that said nodes represent, wherein context-specific cues comprise lexical name, semantic name, type, structure, and functional mappings; computing an overall weight for each edge in said bipartite graph by combining said similarity scores of each set of nodes that form an edge; obtaining an optimal matching between said source and target schemas by maximizing the number of nodes matched and maximizing the weight of selected edges to produce a matching score; and ranking such matching according to weights of said edges between said related nodes, for matchings having the same number of nodes.