Modeling tools for the integration of structured data sources

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, February 2011."December 2010." Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 61-64).Disparity in representations within structured documents such as XML or SQL makes interoperability challenging, error-prone and expensive. A model is developed to process disparate representations to an encompassing generic knowledge representation. Data sources were characterized according to a number of smaller models: their case; the underlying data storage structures; a content model based on the ontological structure defined by the documents schema; and the data model or physical structure of the schema. In order to harmonize different representations and give them semantic meaning, from the above categories the representation is mapped to a common dictionary. The models were implemented as a structured data analysis tool and a basis was built to compare across schema and documents. Data exchange within modeling and simulation environments are increasingly in the form of XML using a variety of schema. Therefore, we demonstrate the use of this modeling tool to automatically harmonized multiple disparate XML data sources in a prototype simulated environment.by Jyotsna Venkataramanan.M.Eng

Conceptual Views over the Web

The Internet has made available an enormous quantity of information to a disparate variety of people. The amount of information, the typical access modality (i.e. browsing), and the open growth of the Net, force the puzzled user to search the information of interest in a labyrinth of billions of links. This is very different from traditional database querying, where the user has just the duty of specifying which are the data s/he wants to retrieve. We argue that, in order to provide the user with a powerful and friendly query mechanism for accessing information on the Web, the critical problem is to find effective ways to build models of the information of interest. In this paper we motivate the above observation by presenting notable attempts to construct systems which model the information in the Web following different approaches. We first classify such systems in two categories, as being based on Database or Knowledge Representation techniques, and discuss thei..

Conceptual Views over the Web

The Internet has made available an enormous quantity of information to a disparate variety of people. The amount of information, the typical access modality (i.e. browsing), and the open growth of the Net, force the puzzled user to search the information of interest in a labyrinth of billions of links. This is very different from traditional database querying, where the user has just the duty of specifying which are the data s/he wants to retrieve. We argue that, in order to provide the user with a powerful and friendly query mechanism for accessing information on the Web, the critical problem is to find effective ways to build models of the information of interest. In this paper we motivate the above observation by presenting notable attempts to construct systems which model the information in the Web following different approaches. We first classify such systems in two categories, as being based on Database or Knowledge Representation techniques, and discuss their main advantages and..