Effective manipulation of string data is of fundamental importance to modern database applications. Very often, textual inconsistencies render equality comparisons meaningless and strings have to be matched in terms of their similarity. Previous work has proposed techniques to express similarity operations using declarative SQL statements. However, the non-trivial issue of embedding similarity support into object-oriented applications has received little attention. Particularly, a number of

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... xes have to be maintained for each similarity predicate, thereby severely complicating persistence of application objects. In this paper, we present SimDataMapper, an architectural pattern to provide easy, efficient, and flexible integration of declarative similarity matching with applications and programming environments. We describe implementation details and experimentally evaluate the performance of our approach.