Explaining Reference Reconciliation Decisions: A Coloured Petri Nets Based Approach

Data integration systems aims at facilitating the management of heterogeneous data sources. When huge amount of data have to be integrated, resorting to human validations is not possible. However, completely automatic integration methods may give rise to decision errors and to approximated results. Hence, such systems need explanation modules to enhance the user confidence in the integrated data. In this paper, we focus our study on reference reconciliation methods which compare data descriptions to decide whether they refer to the same real world entity. Numerical reference reconciliation methods that are global and ontology driven, exploit semantic knowledge to model the dependencies between similarities and to propagate them to other references. In order to explain the similarity scores and the reconciliation decisions obtained by such methods, we have developed an explanation model based on Coloured Petri Nets which provides graphical and comprehensive explanations to the user. This model allows to show the relevance of one decision, and to diagnose possible anomalies in the domain knowledge or in the similarity measures that are used.