Abstract Multi-layered approach to aligning heterogeneous ontologies

In various domain specific applications with heterogeneous databases, an ontologydriven approach to data integration relies on the alignment of the concepts of a global ontology that describes the domain, with the concepts of the ontologies that describe the data in the local databases. Once the alignment between the global ontology and each local ontology is established, agreements that encode a variety of mappings between concepts are derived. In this way, users can potentially query hundreds of distributed databases using a single query that hides the underlying heterogeneities. Using our approach, querying can be easily extended to new data sources. In this paper, we propose our “multi-layered ” ontology alignment approach and the underlying algorithms that are used to establish mappings between the concepts. We also present the AgreementMaker, our ontology alignment tool that implements our approach, our tool displays the ontologies, supports several “mapping layers ” visually, presents automatically generated mappings, and finally produces the agreements.

Ontology Alignment for Real-World Applications

this paper, we represent the ontologies as trees. The vertices of the trees correspond to concepts in the ontology. Throughout the examples, the left tree represents the global ontology and the right tree represents the local ontolog

Semi-Automatic Ontology Alignment for Geospatial Data Integration

Abstract. In geospatial applications with heterogeneous databases, an ontology-driven approach to data integration relies on the alignment of the concepts of a global ontology that describe the domain, with the concepts of the ontologies that describe the data in the local databases. Once the alignment between the global ontology and each local ontology is established, users can potentially query hundreds of databases using a single query that hides the underlying heterogeneities. Using our approach, querying can be easily extended to a new data source by aligning a local ontology with the global one. For this purpose, we have designed and implemented a tool to align ontologies. The output of this tool is a set of mappings between concepts, which will be used to produce the queries to the local databases once a query is formulated on the global ontology. To facilitate the user’s task, we propose semi-automatic methods for propagating such mappings along the ontologies. In this paper, we present the principles behind our propagation method, the implementation of the tool, and we conclude with a discussion of interesting cases and proposed solutions.

XML Database Integration for Visualizing US Election Results

In order for data from XML heterogeneous data sets to be viewed and analyzed using a common application, we propose the mapping between each schema and a central schema. The demo uses the example of an application to visualize the US Presidential election results, to illustrate our approach. To minimize the need for human intervention and code maintenance, a declarative approach is used. XML documents are treated as graphs and the queries posed by the user are converted to XPath expressions. The results of the XPath expression are collected and displayed to the user, using interactive maps in a web browser.