Resolving semantic heterogeneity in schema integration

  • Authors:

  • Farshad Hakimpour;Andreas Geppert

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Zurich;University of Zurich

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the international conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems - Volume 2001
  • Year:
  • 2001

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Interoperability and integration of data sources are becoming evermore important issues as both, the amount of data and the number ofdata producers are growing. Interoperability not only has toresolve the differences in data structures, it also has to dealwith semantic heterogeneity. Semantics refer to the meaningof data in contrast to syntax, which only defines the structure ofthe schema items (e.g., classes and attributes). We focus on thepart of semantics related to the meanings of the terms used asidentifiers in schema definitions. This paper presents an approachto integrate schemas from different communities, where each suchcommunity is using its own ontology. The approach is based onmerging ontologies based on similarity relations among concepts ofdifferent ontologies. We present formal definitions of similarityrelations based on intensional definitions and conclude theextensional consequences. The process of merging ontologies basedon the detected similarity relations is discussed. The mergedontology is finally used to derive an integrated schema. Theresulting schema can be used as the global schema in a federateddatabase system.