ZTE Communications ›› 2015, Vol. 13 ›› Issue (4): 25-33.doi: 10.3969/j.issn.1673-5188.2015.04.004

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A Novel Data Schema Integration Framework for the Human-Centric Services in Smart City

Ding Xia, Da Cui, Jiangtao Wang, Yasha Wang   

  1. Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
  • Received:2015-08-26 Online:2015-12-25 Published:2015-12-25
  • About author:Ding Xia (847525974@qq.com) is a postgraduate of Department of Information Science and Technology, Peking University, China. His research interests including ubiquitous computing.
    Da Cui (443021181@qq.com) is a postgraduate of Department of Information Science and Technology, Peking University, China. His research interests including ubiquitous computing.
    Jiangtao Wang (jiangtaowang@pku.edu.cn) is a postdoc researcher of Department of Information Science and Technology, Peking University, China. His research interests including mobile crowdsensing and ubiquitous computing.
    Yasha Wang (wangyasha@pku.edu.cn) , PhD, is a professor of National Engineering and Research Center of Software Engineering, Peking University, China. His research interests including software reuse, data analytics, ubiquitous computing.
  • Supported by:
    This work is funded by the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (863) under Grant No. 2013AA01A605.

Abstract: Human-centric service is an important domain in smart city and includes rich applications that help residents with shopping, dining, transportation, entertainment, and other daily activities. These applications have generated a massive amount of hierarchical data with different schemas. In order to manage and analyze the city-wide and cross-application data in a unified way, data schema integration is necessary. However, data from human-centric services has some distinct characteristics, such as lack of support for semantic matching, large number of schemas, and incompleteness of schema element labels. These make the schema integration difficult using existing approaches. We propose a novel framework for the data schema integration of the human-centric services in smart city. The framework uses both schema metadata and instance data to do schema matching, and introduces human intervention based on a similarity entropy criteria to balance precision and efficiency. Moreover, the framework works in an incremental manner to reduce computation workload. We conduct an experiment with real-world dataset collected from multiple estate sale application systems. The results show that our approach can produce high-quality mediated schema with relatively less human interventions compared to the baseline method.

Key words: schema matching, schema integration, smart city, human-centric service