Semi-automatic Ontology Alignment for Geospatial Data Integration

In geospatial applications with heterogeneous databases, 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 local ontology 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 data source by aligning a local ontology with the global one. For this purpose, we have designed and implemented a 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. To facilitate the user’s task, we propose semi-automatic methods for propagating such mappings along the ontologies. In this paper, we presen...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: GISCIENCE
• Authors: Isabel F. Cruz, William Sunna, Anjli Chaudhry
• Keywords: GIS, GISCIENCE 2004, Global Ontology, Local Databases, Local Ontology