Mediatability: Estimating User Effort to Mediate Between Two XML Schemas

Mediation and integration of data is one of the impor-tant challenges because of the ever-increasing number of services on the Web and heterogeneities in their data rep-resentations. Towards addressing this challenge, we intro-duce a new measure called mediatability. Mediatability is a quantifiable and computable metric that measures the de-gree and complexity of human involvement in XML schema mediation. We also present an efficient algorithm to com-pute mediatability. We provide an experimental study to an-alyze the impact of having semantic annotations in deter-mining the ease of mediation between two schemas. We val-idate our approach by comparing the mediatability scores generated by our system against that of user perceived dif-ficulty in mediation. We also evaluate the scalability of our system in both client and server contexts. Web