Semantic integration of XML heterogeneous data sources

With the current explosion of data, retrieving and integrating information from various sources is a critical problem. The designer has to specify a mediated schema providing a homogeneous view of the sources. We report on an initial work toward automatically generating mappings between elements in the sources and the mediated schema. Information sources we are interested in are XML documents with respect to a document type definition (DTD). We describe the Xyleme project and present our approach implemented in the SAMAG system to automatically find mappings on the basis of semantic and structural criteria. Finally, we report the first results of an experiment where SAMAG has been applied to XML documents in the cultural domain.