MostoDE: A tool to exchange data amongst semantic-web ontologies

Abstract

A semantic-web ontology, simply known as ontology, comprises a data model and data that should comply with it. Due to their distributed nature, there exist a large amount of heterogeneous ontologies, and a strong need for exchanging data amongst them, i.e.; populating a target ontology using data that come from one or more source ontologies. Data exchange may be implemented using correspondences that are later transformed into executable mappings; however, exchanging data amongst ontologies is not a trivial task, so tools that help software engineers to exchange data amongst ontologies are a must. In the literature, there are a number of tools to automatically generate executable mappings; unfortunately, they have some drawbacks, namely: (1) they were designed to work with nested-relational data models, which prevents them to be applied to ontologies; (2) they require their users to handcraft and maintain their executable mappings, which is not appealing; or (3) they do not attempt to identify groups of correspondences, which may easily lead to incoherent target data. In this article, we present MostoDE, a tool that assists software engineers in generating SPARQL executable mappings and exchanging data amongst ontologies. The salient features of our tool are as follows: it allows to automate the generation of executable mappings using correspondences and constraints; it integrates several systems that implement semantic-web technologies to exchange data; and it provides visual aids for helping software engineers to exchange data amongst ontologies. © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.