Information Integration with Ontologies Experiences from an Industrial Showcase

by Alexiev, Vladimir; Breu, Michael; de Bruijn, Jos; Fensel, Dieter; Lara, Ruben; Lausen, Holger

• ISBN13: 9780470010488
• ISBN10: 0470010487
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-04-15
• Publisher: WILEY

Summary

Disparate information, spread over various sources, in various formats, and with incon-sistent semantics is a major obstacle for enterprises to use this information at its full potential. Information Grids should allow for the effective access, extraction and linking of dispersed information. Currently Europe's coporations spend over 10 Billion '‚¬ to deal with these problems.This book will demonstrate the applicability of grid technologies to industry. To this end, it gives a detailed insight on how on-tology technology can be used to manage dispersed information assets more efficiently. The book is based on experiences from the COG (Corporate Ontology Grid) project, carried out jointly by three leading industrial players and the Digital Enterprise Research Institute Austria. Through comparisons of this project with alternative technologies and projects, it provides hands-on experience and best practice examples to act as a reference guide for their development.Information Integration with Ontologies: Ontology based Information Integration in an Industrial Setting is ideal for technical experts and computer researchers in the IT-area looking to achieve integration of heterogeneous information and apply ontology technologies and techniques in practice. It will also be of great benefit to technical decision makers seeking infor-mation about ontology technologies and the scientific audience, interested in achievements towards the application of ontologies in an industrial setting.

Author Biography

The book is authored by members of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) headed by Professor Dieter Fensel.

Professor Fensel is the scientific director of DERI at the National University of Ireland, Galway, based on a large grant acquired from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). His current research interests include Ontologies, semantic web, web services, knowledge management, enterprise application integration, and electronic commerce.  He is a major scientific player in the area of the semantic web and has authored and co-edited 9 books, and more than 150 publications in journals and conferences.  He is associate editor of the Knowledge and Information Systems: An International Journal (KAIS), IEEE Intelligent Systems, the Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (ETAI), Web Intelligence and Agent Systems (WIAS), Elsevier's Journal on Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web and the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) subline entitled "Semantics in Data Management".

Table of Contents

Foreword.

1 Introduction.

1.1 Finding A Way out of the Dilemma.

1.2 The Background to this Book.

1.3 The Structure of the Book.

2 Data Modelling and Ontologies.

2.1 The Information Integration Problem.

2.2 Semantic Information Management.

2.3 Conclusions.

3 Information Integration with Relational Databases and XML.

3.1 Introduction.

3.2 Relational Database Integration.

3.3 XML-Based Integration.

3.4 Conclusions.

4 The Show Case.

4.1 Data Sources.

4.2 Identifying overlaps between the Data Sources.

4.3 Current ways of dealing with Heterogeneity.

5 Semantic Information Integration.

5.1 Approaches in Information Integration.

5.2 Mapping heterogeneous data sources.

5.3 Other Methods and Tools.

5.4 Comparison of the Methods.

5.5 Conclusions and Future Work.

6 Data Source Queries.

6.1 Querying disparate data sources using the Unicorn Workbench.

6.2 Querying disparate data source.

6.3 Related Work.

6.4 Conclusions.

7 Generating Transformations.

7.1 Information transformation in the COG project.

7.2 Other approaches related to information transformation.

7.3 Conclusions, limitations and extensions.

8 Best Practices and Methodologies employed.

8.1 Best Practices.

8.2 Lessons Learned.

8.3 Conclusions.

9 Conclusion.

References.

Glossary.