Sebastian Monka, Pramod Anantharam, Thien Vo Minh +1cs.AI cs.CL
Enterprise entity alignment must handle semi-structured records, implicit attributes, and unit or granularity mismatches. Manual matching is still common in practice, but does not scale as schemas and providers evolve. LLM-only matching improves semantic recall, yet can violate structural and physical invariants, producing fluent yet operationally invalid correspondences. We propose constraint-guided mapping (CGM), a neuro-symbolic method with three stages: (i) schema-grounded admissibility constraints with metadata mc = <tau_c, delta_c>, where tau_c denotes the constraint type and delta_c provides executable relation and normalization logic; (ii) constraint-restricted candidate generation with cascade relaxation to guarantee a nonempty feasible set under noise; and (iii) neural ranking with bounded LLM disambiguation restricted to that feasible set. Methodologically, constraints operate as hypothesis-space operators rather than post-hoc validators, enabling controlled degradation under relaxation and auditable, human-guidable decisions. On a controlled structural-decoy benchmark, hard admissibility shrinks the candidate space by ~480x without dropping the GT, and a layer-by-layer ablation shows this gate, not the LLM, is the decisive lift (F1 0.08 to 0.66). The benefit is model-independent and adds no extra inference cost: a small model with constraints matches a frontier LLM used without them at ~28x lower cost. The method, not a single tuned configuration, transfers across seven enterprise makes (macro F1 0.70), each under its own automatically discovered, expert-refinable constraints, and lowers expert effort by ~7x versus spreadsheet workflows. Public Valentine results add an external ranking sanity check and mark the boundary: constraints should be hard only where structural invariants are match-determining.
Giacomo De Colle, Helena Blackmore, Chris Partridgecs.AI cs.DB cs.LO
In this paper we discuss the foundations behind a novel methodology for the validation of semantic mappings between different data sources based upon different foundation ontologies, where the methodology builds a framework based upon the metaphysical commitments of the ontologies. We provide as example the test case of mappings between IES and BFO, and we especially focused on providing cardinality constraints on the mappings between the two ontologies. In order to demonstrate the applicability of our method, we showcased how these principles can be operationalized through SPARQL queries validating the results of a mapping pipeline.
Modern AI is no longer a single model but an ecosystem: classical ML predictors, deep and multimodal models, large language models, and agents, each trained and tuned over different data sources and each producing outputs at scale that become inputs to the others. Operating such an ecosystem is fundamentally a data integration problem - the knowledge it depends on is fragmented across dozens of heterogeneous, independently governed sources that must be reconciled and continually maintained. Yet integration alone is not enough. The predictions these systems make are shaped by many interacting factors, and the events, decisions, and variables that drive an outcome are routinely entangled with the ones that merely accompany it; treated as a basis for action, such correlational signals invite confounded decisions. This becomes acute once agents act autonomously: to be trustworthy and reliable, an agent must anticipate the consequences of its actions, not merely extrapolate from what has co-occurred before. Causal reasoning is what closes this gap, distinguishing the drivers of an outcome from its correlates, and enabling prescriptive and counterfactual analysis over the ecosystem's data. We therefore argue that the integrated ecosystem needs an explicit causal layer, and we propose to build it as a shared, persistent, queryable Causal World System (CWS).
Biomedical knowledge graphs (KGs) are pivotal for knowledge organization, yet traditional binary relations often struggle to represent the conditional nature of biomedical knowledge. Symptoms provide a shared phenotypic layer for linking Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), which relies on symptom patterns for syndrome differentiation and treatment selection, with modern biomedicine, which connects clinical manifestations to diseases and molecular mechanisms. We present LingShu, a large-scale symptom-centric contextualized knowledge graph designed to bridge TCM and modern biomedicine. The exported version of LingShu analyzed in this study comprises 17.33 million atom-level entity records and 39.47 million relation records, including 17.19 million semantic triples and 22.29 million contextualized quadruples. LingShu integrates multi-source data, including clinical electronic medical records, authoritative TCM texts, biomedical ontologies, and curated knowledge bases, through a pipeline combining natural language processing, terminology normalization, and human-in-the-loop verification. A key innovation of LingShu is its hybrid data model: it maintains 64 typed triple relation patterns to ensure broad connectivity, while incorporating 35 contextual quadruple relation patterns to capture conditional medical associations. This dual-structure approach explicitly encodes conditional knowledge, providing a granular representation of the contexts associated with medical relations. These contextualized relations cover syndrome-dependent herb efficacy, disease-contextualized drug effects, population-specific clinical associations, and mechanism-related therapeutic responses. Furthermore, we developed a web platform (http://www.tcmkg.com/) that integrates graph visualization, graph-based reasoning, and an evidence-grounded knowledge question-answering agent.
Kaushik Pavani, Ganga Aluri, Pravin Jadhav +2cs.LG cs.AI
We built and evaluated a self-serve entity resolution (ER) system on six benchmarks spanning 864 to 5M records, and three lessons emerged that are absent from existing ER literature. (1) No single matching algorithm wins everywhere - a self-serve pipeline cannot predict its next dataset, so we recommend training several algorithm families per dataset and letting an automatic bake-off pick the winner. (2) Precision and recall need separate fixes, not a shared threshold - precision needs hard rule-based vetoes, recall needs more diverse candidate retrieval. (3) One false-positive link can silently merge unrelated entities - assuming "A matches B" and "B matches C" implies "A matches C" lets a single bad link chain hundreds of records together, so every cross-group merge must be actively re-verified. We hope these lessons save practitioners the months of dead-end experiments that led us to them.
Large language models (LLMs) and AI agents have demonstrated strong potential for data integration in zero-shot and few-shot settings. However, they continue to face significant accuracy and cost challenges in enterprise environments due to a persistent knowledge gap. This paper envisions trustworthy, scalable, and cost-efficient integration through knowledge-grounded LLMs and agents operating within a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workflow. Here, trustworthiness refers to evidence-grounded, verifiable reasoning, where integration decisions are transparently supported by retrieved knowledge, robust against hallucination, and consistent across tasks. We trace the evolution from classic RAG to GraphRAG and KG-RAG (knowledge graph-based RAG), highlighting how these paradigms bridge parametric and contextual knowledge. Building on this trajectory, we explore the shift toward Agentic RAG, where autonomous multi-agent systems adaptively plan, retrieve, refine, and reason for complex integration tasks. We examine optimization strategies for cost-efficient integration, addressing computational bottlenecks in large-scale enterprise settings. Finally, we outline open challenges and future directions toward building reliable, explainable, and scalable knowledge-grounded integration systems.
When data sources are integrated through a shared interface, a downstream query may or may not be determined by what the interface exposes: two globally consistent worlds can agree on every shared attribute yet disagree on the query answer. This ambiguity is structural -- a property of the interface design, not the data volume -- and cannot be resolved by collecting more records or training a larger model. We formalize query identifiability for data integration under interface laws (functional dependencies that hold uniformly across all legal worlds rather than within a single instance) and prove three results. (i) A polynomial-time certificate (CheckCert) decides identifiability via attribute closure, and is exact on instances that expose any residual ambiguity (closure-separable). (ii) Non-identifiable queries face an irreducible 1/2 minimax error floor for any estimator using only interface evidence, bounding multi-view pretraining systems from below. (iii) A minimum-augmentation algorithm (Greedy-MinAug) finds the smallest set of interface additions to certify a query, reducing to Set Cover (logarithmic approximation). Experiments on synthetic benchmarks, real integration datasets spanning three domains (scholarly, product, restaurant), and schemas up to 10^3 attributes confirm CheckCert is exact, both algorithms run in single-digit milliseconds, and ML classifiers exhibit the predicted error floor and abrupt capability gains.
Aaron Steiner, Ralph Peeters, Christian Bizercs.DB cs.CL
Data integration combines heterogeneous data sets into a single, coherent representation. Data integration involves a sequence of interdependent tasks including schema matching, value normalization, entity blocking, entity matching, and data fusion. Existing benchmarks either evaluate these steps in isolation or cover only incomplete versions of the data integration pipeline, omitting specific steps. The lack of public end-to-end data integration benchmarks hinders research on data integration methods that address the integration process as a whole. This paper fills this gap by introducing the Mannheim Data Integration Benchmark (MaDI-Bench), the first benchmark for the end-to-end integration of relational tables covering all steps of the integration process. MaDI-Bench contributes (i) a set of base end-to-end data integration tasks spanning several application domains, each requiring the full schema matching, value normalization, entity matching, and conflict resolution pipeline; and (ii) a generic method for deriving task variants that mitigates rapid benchmark saturation as data integration systems advance. We validate the benchmark using human-engineered pipelines, a best-of-breed pipeline, and an LLM-based pipeline. The validation demonstrates the utility of the benchmark for measuring the step-wise as well as the end-to-end performance of data integration pipelines. All benchmark artifacts are available for public download.
Nicholas Pulsone, Gregory Goren, Roee Shragacs.DB cs.AI cs.LG
Entity Matching (EM) is a core operation in the data integration pipeline, where records from different sources are compared to determine whether they refer to the same real-world entity. Recent work has incorporated domain information and low-resource learning techniques to better adapt EM systems to realistic settings. While these approaches have demonstrated strong performance, it remains unclear how they behave under varying data constraints and levels of supervision in practice. In this paper, we investigate a state-of-the-art method for low-resource, domain-aware EM--BEACON--and study how its performance is affected by different algorithmic choices and data availability conditions. We conduct a series of targeted experiments to evaluate these variations, providing deeper insight into the role of distribution alignment and the behavior of the BEACON framework.
Anoushka Vyas, Aarushi Dhanuka, Sina Khoshfetrat Pakazad +1cs.MA cs.AI cs.DB
Production data integration is bottlenecked by repeated, lossy handoffs between data owners, engineers, and analysts who must collaboratively discover, structure, and query enterprise data. We present Data Intelligence Agents (DIA), a system of three agents (Data Interpreter, Schema Creator, and Query Generator) that compresses this workflow by treating autonomous coding agents (ACAs) as a first-class abstraction: rather than emitting text, the agents generate, execute, validate, and repair concrete artifacts, draw on a shared memory for experience reuse, and surface each for review by domain experts. DIA is deployed in production for enterprise customers. We study the Query Generator in depth and evaluate it in fully autonomous mode across seven SQL benchmarks spanning four task categories and four dialects. It matches or surpasses the best published results on all seven, demonstrating that an architecture grounded in execution, built on ACAs and a shared memory, generalizes across the data intelligence workload with adaptation confined to natural-language instructions.
Leonard Traeger, Enas Khwaileh, Andreas Behrend +1cs.DB cs.IR cs.LG
Schema matching, a critical task for integrating data from diverse sources, seeks to identify correspondences between columns across different schemas. In multi-table holistic schema matching, columns with similar semantic meaning may reside in tables with different contexts due to heterogeneous schema designs, where similarity-based techniques are inadequate. The focus of this paper is exploiting referential context into schema matching by introducing RACT learning and prediction, a self-supervised framework enabling the probabilistic retrieval of candidate tables for source columns to constrain relevant column candidates. Experiments demonstrate that this approach outperforms similarity-based baselines on matching multi-table schemas. In subsequent matching experiments, constraining the column search space via top-t tables improves both average matching precision and completeness by up to +70%.
Integrating new data into knowledge graphs (KG) typically involves different tasks that are executed within workflows or pipelines There are many possible pipelines for a specific integration problem but there is not yet a general approach to evaluate the overall quality and performance of such pipelines to be able to determine the best choices. We therefore propose a new benchmark KGI-Bench to evaluate integration pipelines that ingest different kinds of input data into an existing KG. We evaluate pipelines by analyzing their output, i.e., the updated KG, with the three complementary quality metrics coverage, correctness and consistency. We also provide benchmark datasets (seed KG, overlapping input data of three formats, reference KG as a ground truth) for the movie domain. To demonstrate the applicability and usefulness of the proposed benchmark, we comparatively evaluate 12 pipelines and analyze their behavior across different input data formats and design choices.
Knowledge graphs have become the primary vehicle for data integration and are critical to the success of modern AI, but the diversity of KG modelling practices, from lightweight vocabularies to richly axiomatised ontologies, makes integration and reuse expensive and brittle. This challenge is particularly acute in neuro-symbolic AI, where bridging neural and symbolic components depends on the ability to reengineer KGs to fit new requirements; GenAI now offers unprecedented automation capability, but without a principled understanding of the KG space, such automation remains conceptually ungrounded. We introduce the ontological continuum as that missing conceptualisation, a theoretical construct a theoretical construct whose characterisation framework is defined by two orthogonal distinctions: semantics vs pragmatics, and properties vs affordances; together these define a vocabulary to describe, compare, navigate, and transform KGs across the full range of modelling practices. The methodological stance is empirical: rather than prescribing how KGs should be modelled, the continuum aims to define a theory of the existent, derived from observation of real-world KG engineering practices and whose structure can be made formally explicit, for example, through Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). We ground the vision through a case study on provenance knowledge, showing how a single concern manifests differently across the continuum. We articulate five open research challenges and invite the community to develop the ontological continuum as a shared research agenda.