MatWare: Constructing and exploiting domain specific warehouses by aggregating semantic data

Abstract

In many applications one has to fetch and assemble pieces of information coming from more than one web sources such as SPARQL endpoints. In this paper we describe the corresponding requirements and challenges, based on our experience, and then we present a process and a tool that we have developed, called MatWare , for constructing such semantic warehouses. We focus on domain-specific warehouses, where the focus is given on the aspects of scope control, connectivity assessment, provenance, and freshness. MatWare (Materialized Warehouse) is a tool that automates the construction (and reconstruction) of such warehouses, and offers methods for tackling the aforementioned requirements. Finally we report our experiences from using it for building, maintaining and evolving an operational semantic warehouse for the marine domain, that is currently in use by several applications ranging from e-infrastructure services to smart phone applications. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.