Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2004, Volume 3234/2004, 51-66, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-30231-5_4

Semi-automatic Ontology Alignment for Geospatial Data Integration

Isabel F. Cruz, William Sunna and Anjli Chaudhry

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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 userrsquos 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.
This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Awards EIA-0091489 and ITR IIS-0326284.

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