Melis: an incremental method for the lexical annotation of domain ontologies

In this paper, we present MELIS (Meaning Elicitation and Lexical Integration System), a method and a software tool for enabling an incremental process of automatic annotation of local schemas (e.g. relational database schemas, directory trees) with lexical information. The distinguishing and original feature of MELIS is the incremental process: the higher the number of schemas which are processed, the more background/domain knowledge is cumulated in the system (a portion of domain ontology is learned at every step), the better the performance of the systems on annotating new schemas.MELIS has been tested as component of MOMIS-Ontology Builder, a framework able to create a domain ontology representing a set of selected data sources, described with a standard W3C language wherein concepts and attributes are annotated according to the lexical reference database.We describe the MELIS component within the MOMIS-Ontology Builder framework and provide some experimental results of ME LIS as a standalone tool and as a component integrated in MOMIS

instances navigation for querying integrated data from web-sites

Abstract: Research on data integration has provided a set of rich and well understood schema mediation languages and systems that provide a meta-data representation of the modeled real world, while, in general, they do not deal with data instances. Such meta-data are necessary for querying classes result of an integration process: the end user typically does not know the contents of such classes, he simply defines his queries on the basis of the names of classes and attributes. In this paper we introduce an approach enriching the description of selected attributes specifying as meta-data a list of the “relevant values ” for such attributes. Furthermore relevant values may be hierarchically collected in a taxonomy. In this way, the user may exploit new meta-data in the interactive process of creating/refining a query. The same meta-data are also exploited by the system in the query rewriting/unfolding process in order to filter the results showed to the user. We conducted an evaluation of the strategy in an e-business context within the EU-IST SEWASIE project. The evaluation proved the practicability of the approach for large value instances.

WEB recommendations for E-commerce websites

In this part of the thesis we have investigated how the navigation utilizing web recommendations can be implemented on the e-commerce websites based on integrated data sources. The integrated e-commerce websites are an interesting use case for web recommendations. One of the reasons for this interest is that many modern, large and economically successful e-commerce websites follow the integrated approach. Another reason is that especially in the integrated environment, due to the lack of the pre-defined semantic connections between the data, the web recommendations step forward as means of enabling user navigation. In this chapter we have presented the architecture for the websites based on integrated data sources named EC-Fuice. We have also presented the prototypical implementation of our architecture which serves as a proof-of-concept and investigated the challenges of creating navigation on an integrated website. The following issues were addressed in this part of the thesis: Combination of several state-of-the-art tools and techniques in the fields of databases, data integration, ontology matching and web engineering into one generic architecture for creating integrated websites. Comparative experiments with several techniques for instance matching (also known as record linkage or duplicate detection). Investigation on using the ontology matching to facilitate the instance matching. Comparative experiments with several techniques for ontology matching. Investigations on the instance-based ontology matching and the possibilities for combining instance-based ontology matching with other techniques for ontology matching. Investigation of the possibilities to improve user navigation in the integrated data environment with different types of web recommendations. Review of the related work in the fields of data integration and ontology matching and discussion of the contact points between the research described here and other related projects. The main contributions of the research described in this part of the thesis are the EC-Fuice architecture, the novel method for matching e-commerce ontologies based on combination of instance information and metadata information, the experimental results of ontology and instance matching performed by different matching algorithms and the classification of the types of recommendations which can be used on an integrated e-commerce website