Semantic integration

Abstract

Semantic integration is an active area of research in several disciplines, such as databases, information-integration, and ontologies. This paper provides a brief survey of the approaches to semantic integration developed by researchers in the ontology community. We focus on the approaches that differentiate the ontology research from other related areas. The goal of the paper is to provide a reader who may not be very familiar with ontology research with introduction to major themes in this research and with pointers to different research projects. We discuss techniques for finding correspondences between ontologies, declarative ways of representing these correspondences, and use of these correspondences in various semantic-integration tasks