Learning to discover complex mappings from web forms to ontologies

In order to realize the Semantic Web, various structures on the Web including Web forms need to be annotated with and mapped to domain ontologies. We present a machine learning-based automatic approach for discovering complex mappings from Web forms to ontologies. A complex mapping associates a set of semantically related elements on a form to a set of semantically related elements in an ontology. Existing schema mapping solutions mainly rely on integrity constraints to infer complex schema mappings. However, it is difficult to extract rich integrity constraints from forms. We show how machine learning techniques can be used to automatically discover complex mappings between Web forms and ontologies. The challenge is how to capture and learn the complicated knowledge encoded in existing complex mappings. We develop an initial solution that takes a naive Bayesian approach. We evaluated the performance of the solution on various domains. Our experimental results show that the solution returns the expected mappings as the top-1 results usually among several hundreds candidate mappings for more than 80% of the test cases. Furthermore, the expected mappings are always returned as the top-k results with k<4. The experiments have demonstrated that the approach is effective and has the potential to save significant human efforts.