A model-driven approach for designing distributed Web information systems

Abstract

There is an apparent need for specifying the integration of multiple knowledge sources during the design of Web Information Systems (WIS) where the actual data is often retrieved from several content providers. Despite that, there exists very little work on integration within the context of WIS engineering and the related design methodologies in particular. We argue that this new context brings several additional requirements which must be dealt with in order to be able to successfully deploy distributed WIS. In this paper we elaborate a model that covers the integration phase of the WIS design trajectory. We centered our approach around the emerging data standard on the Semantic Web - RDF. The proposed integration model is able to reconcile many semantic heterogeneities that frequently occur among disparate RDF sources. We also address the issues of distributed RDF query processing and optimization, and test the performance of our framework. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.