Ontology-based data integration methods: a framework for comparison

Abstract

A data integration system provides a uniform interface to distributed and heterogeneous sources. These sources can be databases as well as unstructured information such as files, HTML pages, etc. One of the most important problems within data integration is the semantic heterogeneity, which analyzes the meaning of terms included in the different information sources. This survey describes seven systems and three proposals for ontology -based data integration. An important feature is that all of them use, in some way, ontologies as the way to solve problems about semantic heterogeneity. In this paper, we show similarities and differences among the systems by providing a framework for comparison and classification. Keywords: Data Integration, Ontology, Semantic Heterogeneity.