Managing Multiple Information Sources through Ontologies: Relationship between Vocabulary Heterogeneity and Loss of Information
Eduardo Mena, Vipul Kashyap, Arantza Illarramendi, Amit Sheth · Journal of Bioresource Management · 1996
. The ability to deal with a huge number of independent and heterogeneous repositories is the most critical problem in Global Information Systems. One approach to enable efficient query processing is by utilizing semantic descriptions (organized as ontologies) of such repositories whenever available. In this context semantic relationships among ontologies can be used by Query Processors. Three kind of relationships are considered: synonyms, hyponyms and hypernyms. Using synonyms the semantics of the query is preserved; however, when synonyms are not available and hypernyms or hyponyms are used there exists some loss of information that must be measured. 1 INTRODUCTION The ability to deal with a huge number of independent repositories is the most critical problem in Global Information Systems. One approach to enable efficient query processing is by utilizing semantic descriptions of such repositories whenever available. We view domain specific ontologies as tools to capture the seman...