On Z39.50 wrapping and description logics

Z39.50 is a client/server protocol widely used in digital libraries and museums for searching and retrieving information spread over a number of heterogeneous sources. To overcome semantic and schematic discrepancies among the various data sources the protocol relies on a world view of information as a flat list of fields, called Access Points (AP). One of the major issues for building Z39.50 wrappers is to map this unstructured list of APs to the underlying source data structure and semantics. For highly structured sources (e.g., database management systems, knowledge base systems) this mapping is quite complex and considerably affects the quality of the retrieved data. Unfortunately, existing Z39.50 wrappers have been developed from scratch and they do not provide high-level mapping languages with verifiable properties. In this paper, we propose a description logic (DL) based toolkit for the declarative specification of Z39.50 wrappers. We claim that the conceptualization of AP mappi...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2000
• Where: JODL
• Authors: Yannis Velegrakis, Vassilis Christophides, Panos Constantopoulos
• Keywords: Flat Z39.50 Vocabularies, Intelligent Z39.50 Query, JODL 2000, Z39.50