An Ontology-Based Approach to Data Cleaning

Abstract

This paper describes an ontology-based approach to data cleaning. Data cleaning is the process of detecting and correcting errors in databases. An ontology is a formal explicit specification of a shared conceptualization of a domain. Our approach to data cleaning requires a set of ontologies describing the domains represented by the classes and their attributes. Using the ontology-based approach, we are able to clean data of not only syntactic errors but also some classes of semantic errors