NEMA: Automatic Integration of Large Network Management Databases

Network management, whether for malfunction analysis, failure prediction, performance monitoring and improvement, generally involves large amounts of data from different sources. To effectively integrate and manage these sources, automatically finding semantic matches among their schemas or ontologies is crucial. Existing approaches on database matching mainly fall into two categories. One focuses on the schema-level matching based on schema properties such as field names, data types, constraints and schema structures. Network management databases contain massive tables (e.g., network products, incidents, security alert and logs) from different departments and groups with nonuniform field names and schema characteristics. It is not reliable to match them by those schema properties. The other category is based on the instance-level matching using general string similarity techniques, which are not applicable for the matching of large network management databases. In this article, we develop a matching technique for large NEtwork MAnagement databases (NEMA) deploying instance-level matching for effective data integration and connection. We design matching metrics and scores for both numerical and non-numerical fields and propose algorithms for matching these fields. The effectiveness and efficiency of NEMA are evaluated by conducting experiments based on ground truth field pairs in large network management databases. Our measurement on large databases with 1,458 fields, each of which contains over 10 million records, reveals that NEMA can achieve accuracy of 95%. We further compare with several other existing algorithms, and show that NEMA outperforms them by 7%-15% in numerical matching and achieves the best trade-off for non-numerical matching.