A segmentation-based approach for approximate query over distributed ontologies

Abstract

With the popularity of semantic information systems distributed on the Web, there is an arising challenge to provide efficient query answering support for these systems. However, common approaches for distributed query answering either exhibit performance disadvantages or loss of completeness in an unbalanced way. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for segment-based conjunctive query answering over distributed ontologies. Our approach balances the trade-off between performance and completeness by introducing segmentation-based distributed ontology integration. We define the notions of segment and approximate conjunctive query answering. Corresponding algorithms are designed, implemented and evaluated. The evaluation results show that our approach is very promising in processing ontologies in modern semantic information systems. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.