Ontology alignment for real-world applications
Isabel F. Cruz, William Sunna, Anjli Chaudhry · International Conference on Digital Government Research · 2004
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 of the local ontologies 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 database by aligning its ontology with the global one. For this purpose, we have designed and implemented a software 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.