Towards an Ontology-based Integration of Federated Information Sources

Abstract

Integrating data from a Federated System is a very complex process that involves a series of tasks. Characteristics such as autonomy of the information sources, their geographical distribution and heterogeneity are some of the main problems we face to perform the integration. In this paper we focus on the problem of heterogeneity, more specifically on semantic heterogeneity. The semantic heterogeneity makes the integration difficult because of its bearing problems on synonymous, generalization/specialization, etc. Here, we briefly explain our three level approach to solve these problems. Then we show the structure of software components used to implement our supporting tool.