Integrating ontological data sources using viewpoints-based approach

Abstract

Within the development of Internet and intranets, information integration from various data sources becomes increasingly important and more challenging issue. Recently, the trend in data integration has favored the semantic integration using ontologies. However, the existing ontology-based approaches do not support the aspect of data multi-representations, which is important in the development of multi-user applications. The motivation of this paper is to address a novel semantic integration approach based on ontologies and viewpoints paradigms. This contribution combines the advantages of existing ontology-based integration approaches while avoiding their drawbacks. The proposed integration approach is evaluated using query processing. Profiles are introduced to offer answers to users according to their viewpoints and choices.