Survey: Models and Prototypes of Schema Matching

Schema matching is critical problem within many applications to integration of data/information, to achieve interoperability, and other cases caused by schematic heterogeneity. Schema matching evolved from manual way on a specific domain, leading to a new models and methods that are semi-automatic and more general, so it is able to effectively direct the user within generate a mapping among elements of two the schema or ontologies better. This paper is a summary of literature review on models and prototypes on schema matching within the last 25 years to describe the progress of and research chalenge and opportunities on a new models, methods, and/or prototypes

Towards natural language question generation for the validation of ontologies and mappings

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)The increasing number of open-access ontologies and their key role in several applications such as decision-support systems highlight the importance of their validation. Human expertise is crucial for the validation of ontologies from a domain point-of-view. However, the growing number of ontologies and their fast evolution over time make manual validation challenging. Methods: We propose a novel semi-automatic approach based on the generation of natural language (NL) questions to support the validation of ontologies and their evolution. The proposed approach includes the automatic generation, factorization and ordering of NL questions from medical ontologies. The final validation and correction is performed by submitting these questions to domain experts and automatically analyzing their feedback. We also propose a second approach for the validation of mappings impacted by ontology changes. The method exploits the context of the changes to propose correction alternatives presented as Multiple Choice Questions. Results: This research provides a question optimization strategy to maximize the validation of ontology entities with a reduced number of questions. We evaluate our approach for the validation of three medical ontologies. We also evaluate the feasibility and efficiency of our mappings validation approach in the context of ontology evolution. These experiments are performed with different versions of SNOMED-CT and ICD9. Conclusions: The obtained experimental results suggest the feasibility and adequacy of our approach to support the validation of interconnected and evolving ontologies. Results also suggest that taking into account RDFS and OWL entailment helps reducing the number of questions and validation time. The application of our approach to validate mapping evolution also shows the difficulty of adapting mapping evolution over time and highlights the importance of semi-automatic validation.The increasing number of open-access ontologies and their key role in several applications such as decision-support systems highlight the importance of their validation. Human expertise is crucial for the validation of ontologies from a domain point-of-vi7115FAPESP - FUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULOFundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)2014/14890-

OMT, an Ontology Matching System

Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Informatics EngineeringIn recent years ontologies have become an integral part of storing information in a structured and formal manner and a way of sharing said information. With this rise in usage, it was only a matter of time before different people tried to use ontologies to represent the same knowledge domain. The area of Ontology Matching was created with the purpose of finding correspondences between different ontologies that represented information in the same domain area. This document reports a Master’s work that started with the study of already existing ontology matching techniques and tools in order to gain knowledge on what techniques exist, as well as understand the advantages and disadvantages of each one. Using the knowledge obtained from the study of the bibliography research, a new web-based tool called OMT was created to automatically merge two given ontologies. The OMT tool processes ontologies written in different ontology representation languages, such as the OWL family or any language written according to the RDF web standards. The OMT tool provides the user with basic information about the submitted ontologies and after the matching occurs, provides the user with a simplified version of the results focusing on the number of objects that were matched and merged. The user can also download a Log File, if he so chooses. This Log File contains a detailed description of the matching process and the reasoning behind the decisions the OMT tool made. The OMT tool was tested throughout its development phase against various different potential inputs to assess its accuracy. Lastly, a web application was developed to host the OMT tool in order to facilitate the access and use of the tool for the users.Nos últimos tempos, ontologias têm-se tornado fundamentais quando os objetivos são armazenar informação de forma formal e estruturada bem como a partilha de tal informação. Com o aumento da procura e utilização de ontologias, tornou-se inevitável que indivíduos diferentes criassem ontologias para representar o mesmo domínio de informação. A área de concordância de ontologias foi criada com o intuito de encontrar correspondências entre ontologias que representem informação no mesmo domínio. Este documento reporta o trabalho de uma tese de Mestrado que começou pelo estudo de técnicas e ferramentas já existentes na área de concordância de ontologias com o objetivo de obter conhecimento nestas mesmas e perceber as suas vantagens e desvantagens. A partir do conhecimento obtido a partir deste estudo, uma nova ferramenta web chamada OMT foi criada para automaticamente alinhar duas ontologias. A ferramenta OMT processa ontologias escritas em diferentes linguagens de representação, tal como a familia de linguages OWL ou qualquer linguagem que respeite o padrão RDF. A ferramenta OMT fornece ao utilizador informação básica sobre as ontologias e após o alinhamento ocorrer, fornece ao utilizador uma versão simplificada dos resultados obtidos, focando no numero de objetos que foram alinhados. O utilizador pode também descarregar um ficheiro Log. Este ficheiro contém uma descrição destalhada do processo de alinhamento e a justificação para as diferentes decisões tomadas pelo ferramenta OMT. A ferramenta OMT foi testada durante todo o processo de desenvolvimento com diferentes tipos de ontologia de entrada para avaliar a sua capacidade de alinhamento. Por último, foi também desenvolvida uma aplicação web para hospedar a ferramenta OMT de forma a facilitar o acesso e uso da ferramenta aos utilizadores

Service composition based on SIP peer-to-peer networks

Today the telecommunication market is faced with the situation that customers are requesting for new telecommunication services, especially value added services. The concept of Next Generation Networks (NGN) seems to be a solution for this, so this concept finds its way into the telecommunication area. These customer expectations have emerged in the context of NGN and the associated migration of the telecommunication networks from traditional circuit-switched towards packet-switched networks. One fundamental aspect of the NGN concept is to outsource the intelligence of services from the switching plane onto separated Service Delivery Platforms using SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) to provide the required signalling functionality. Caused by this migration process towards NGN SIP has appeared as the major signalling protocol for IP (Internet Protocol) based NGN. This will lead in contrast to ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) and IN (Intelligent Network) to significantly lower dependences among the network and services and enables to implement new services much easier and faster. In addition, further concepts from the IT (Information Technology) namely SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) have largely influenced the telecommunication sector forced by amalgamation of IT and telecommunications. The benefit of applying SOA in telecommunication services is the acceleration of service creation and delivery. Main features of the SOA are that services are reusable, discoverable combinable and independently accessible from any location. Integration of those features offers a broader flexibility and efficiency for varying demands on services. This thesis proposes a novel framework for service provisioning and composition in SIP-based peer-to-peer networks applying the principles of SOA. One key contribution of the framework is the approach to enable the provisioning and composition of services which is performed by applying SIP. Based on this, the framework provides a flexible and fast way to request the creation for composite services. Furthermore the framework enables to request and combine multimodal value-added services, which means that they are no longer limited regarding media types such as audio, video and text. The proposed framework has been validated by a prototype implementation

i3MAGE: Incremental, Interactive, Inter-Model Mapping Generation

Data integration is a highly important prerequisite for most enterprise data analyses. While hard in general, a particular concern is about human effort for designing a global integration schema, authoring queries against that schema, and creating mappings to connect data sources with the global schema. Ontology-based data integration (OBDI), which employs ontologies as a target model, reduces the effort for schema design and usage. On the other side, it requires mappings that are particularly difficult to create. Architects who work with OBDI hence need systems to support the process of mapping development. One key type of tooling to support mapping development is automatic or semi-automatic generation of mapping suggestions. While many such tools exist in the wider sphere of data integration, few are built to work in the case of OBDI, where the inter-model gap between relational input schemata and a target ontology has to be bridged. Among those that support OBDI at all, none so far are fully optimized for this specific case by performing a truly inter-model matching while also leveraging distinct but corresponding aspects of both models. We propose i3MAGE, an approach and a system for automatic and semi-automatic generation of mappings in OBDI. The system is built on generic inter-model matching, and it is optimized in various ways for matching relational source schemata to target ontology schemata. To be truly semi-automatic in every respect, i3MAGE works both incrementally, building mappings pay-as-you-go, and interactively in exchange with a human user. We introduce a specialized benchmark and evaluate i3MAGE against a number of other approaches. In addition, we provide examples, where i3MAGE can be deployed in holistic data integration environments

Reconciling Schema Matching Networks

Depto. de Mineralogía y PetrologíaFac. de Ciencias GeológicasTRUEpu