An ontology-based approach for integrating heterogeneous databases

Abstract

Integrating heterogeneous data in distributed databases has been a research issue for many years. In this paper, we discuss some of these problems and propose a solution using a semantic model. This semantic model is built upon the semantic relationships between existing data. Applying these semantics enables us to take into account different dimensions of user queries and find the best possible answer for them. The proposed approach leads us to introducing "a common language that is understandable for all databases". We use such a common language in order to return an effective response to the user’s query, as well as reducing the problems of integration.