Bottom-up Integration of Ontologies in a Database Context
Jean-Christophe Pazzaglia, Suzanne M. Embury · 1998
We describe a pragmatic approach to the creation of local ontologies for databases which must be integrated into multi-agent systems. Our approach avoids the introduction of an extra language, solely for modelling the required ontological information, by showing how to extend the expressiveness of a typical OODBMS data definition language. In this paper, we outline the principle behind our approach, and describe the implementation of a prototype system, which has demonstrated its feasibility. Introduction Ontologies have been proposed as a means of achieving consistent communication between agents in multiagent systems. In order to do this, one ontology (or possibly a collection of overlapping ontologies) must be constructed which integrates the combined "world views", or "local ontologies", of the participating agents. In distributed information systems, however, many of these participants will be existing (legacy) databases, which bring with them some limited ontological informatio...