An ontological approach to federated data integration

Abstract

During the last years a lot of projects and lines of research have emerged from different proposals trying to find the best way to reach data integration. Two powerful techniques have appeared separately – ontology and contextual information – in order to help solve semantic heterogeneity problems. In our proposal we combine both techniques exploiting the advantages of each of them. We propose a new approach, in which three main components work together in order to achieve a consistent integration. Each component contains some type of semantic information modeled by ontologies and contexts. Our approach helps the building of each of the components and address other types of heterogeneity such as ontological heterogeneity.