iMAP: Discovering Complex Semantic Matches between Database Schemas

Summary: iMAP semi-automates schema matching beyond 1-1 by exploring a large/infinite space for complex matches (e.g., address = concat(city, state)). It uses specialized searchers, domain knowledge, integrity constraints, and overlap data, with explanations to justify matches and accelerate convergence on real-world schemas. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h4e48a957e9dd6cd4
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2004
Pagerank: 9.3145711e-05
Overall Rank: 1,958 | 86.84%
DOI: 10.1145/1007568.1007612

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Robin Dhamankar (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
2. Yoonkyong Lee (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
3. AnHai Doan (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
4. Alon Halevy (University of Washington)
5. Pedro Domingos (University of Washington)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{dhamankar_sigmod04,
        title = {{iMAP: Discovering Complex Semantic Matches between Database Schemas}},
        author = {Dhamankar, Robin and Lee, Yoonkyong and Doan, AnHai and Halevy, Alon and Domingos, Pedro},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '04},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/1007568.1007612},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1007568.1007612},
        year = {2004}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 16 of 16 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
791	How to ConQueR Why-Not Questions	2010	SIGMOD	0.00013976192
1,667	Bootstrapping Pay-As-You-Go Data Integration Systems	2008	SIGMOD	9.9378851e-05
2,580	Tuning Schema Matching Software using Synthetic Scenarios	2005	VLDB	8.2716518e-05
2,612	Auto-Join: Joining Tables by Leveraging Transformations	2017	VLDB	8.2265197e-05
3,245	InfoGather+: Semantic Matching and Annotation of Numeric and Time-Varying Attributes in Web Tables	2013	SIGMOD	7.4957822e-05
3,304	Multi-column Substring Matching for Database Schema Translation	2006	VLDB	7.4426486e-05
3,748	Discovering Linkage Points over Web Data	2013	VLDB	7.0530039e-05
4,424	Auto-Transform: Learning-to-Transform by Patterns	2020	VLDB	6.6048065e-05
5,191	Mapping Maintenance for Data Integration Systems	2005	VLDB	6.2356403e-05
6,312	Putting Context into Schema Matching	2006	VLDB	5.8171904e-05
6,488	Synthesizing Type-Detection Logic for Rich Semantic Data Types using Open-source Code	2018	SIGMOD	5.76799e-05
6,600	Explain3D: Explaining Disagreements in Disjoint Datasets	2019	VLDB	5.7403306e-05
7,082	Synthesizing Products for Online Catalogs	2011	VLDB	5.6033136e-05
8,790	Extending Relational Query Optimization to Dynamic Schemas for Information Integration in Multidatabases	2007	SIGMOD	5.2764811e-05
8,824	Just-In-Time Query Retrieval Over Partially Indexed Data on Structured P2P Overlays	2008	SIGMOD	5.268676e-05
9,171	Analyzing and Revising Data Integration Schemas to Improve Their Matchability	2008	VLDB	5.2141009e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 10 of 10 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
24	Data Integration: A Theoretical Perspective	2002	PODS	0.00055043581
269	Reconciling Schemas of Disparate Data Sources: A Machine-Learning Approach	2001	SIGMOD	0.00022620777
296	Generic Schema Matching with Cupid	2001	VLDB	0.00021867512
407	COMA - A system for flexible combination of schema matching approaches	2002	VLDB	0.00019026291
435	Mining Database Structure; Or, How to Build a Data Quality Browser	2002	SIGMOD	0.0001832766
465	Using Schema Matching to Simplify Heterogeneous Data Translation	1998	VLDB	0.00017785121
801	Statistical Schema Matching across Web Query Interfaces	2003	SIGMOD	0.0001387328
822	On Schema Matching with Opaque Column Names and Data Values	2003	SIGMOD	0.00013651306
1,050	Data-Driven Understanding and Refinement of Schema Mappings	2001	SIGMOD	0.00012298141
1,728	Using Schematically Heterogeneous Structures	1998	SIGMOD	9.7779564e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	14,001	U-MAP: A System for Usage-Based Schema Matching and Mapping	2011	SIGMOD
2	182	Schema Mapping as Query Discovery	2000	VLDB
3	9,170	The Role of Schema Matching in Large Enterprises	2009	CIDR
4	3,974	On the Complexity of Deriving Schema Mappings from Database Instances	2008	PODS
5	3,397	Designing and Refining Schema Mappings via Data Examples	2011	SIGMOD
6	9,945	Meta-Mappings for Schema Mapping Reuse	2019	VLDB
7	407	COMA - A system for flexible combination of schema matching approaches	2002	VLDB
8	6,312	Putting Context into Schema Matching	2006	VLDB
9	9,171	Analyzing and Revising Data Integration Schemas to Improve Their Matchability	2008	VLDB
10	6,235	MapMerge: Correlating Independent Schema Mappings	2010	VLDB