A framework for ontology integration

TLDR

Ontologies must be semantically integrated to enable information extraction across the diverse web sources that each employ its own ontology. The paper aims to define how to map a global ontology to its constituent local ontologies. It proposes using queries as mappings, treating a concept in one ontology as a view (query) over the others. Consequently, ontology integration query processing is closely tied to view‑based query answering in data integration.

Abstract

One of the basic problems in the development of techniques for the semantic web is the integration of ontologies. Indeed, the web is constituted by a variety of information sources, each expressed over a certain ontology, and in order to extract information from such sources, their semantic integration and reconciliation in terms of a global ontology is required. In this paper, we address the fundamental problem of how to specify the mapping between the global ontology and the local ontologies. We argue that for capturing such mapping in an appropriate way, the notion of query is a crucial one, since it is very likely that a concept in one ontology corresponds to a view (i.e., a query) over the other ontologies. As a result query processing in ontology integration systems is strongly related to view-based query answering in data integration.