Representing and Reasoning for Spatiotemporal Ontology Integration
International audience; The World-Wide Web hosts many autonomous and heterogeneous information sources. In the near future each source may be described by its own ontology. The distributed nature of ontology development will lead to a large number of local ontologies covering overlapping domains. Ontology integration will then become an essential capability for effective interoperability and information sharing. Integration is known to be a hard problem, whose complexity increases particularly in the presence of spatiotemporal information. Space and time entail additional problems such as the heterogeneity of granularity used in representing spatial and temporal features. Spatio-temporal ob…
On Using Conceptual Modeling for Ontologies
Are database concepts and techniques suitable for ontology design and management? The question has been on the floor for some time already. It gets a new emphasis today, thanks to the focus on ontologies and ontology services due to the spread of web services as a new paradigm for information management. This paper analyzes some of the arguments that are relevant to the debate, in particular the question whether conceptual data models would adequately support the design and use of ontologies. It concludes suggesting a hybrid approach, combining databases and logic-based services.
Spatio-temporal Schema Integration with Validation: A Practical Approach
We propose to enhance a schema integration process with a validation phase employing logic-based data models. In our methodology, we validate the source schemas against the data model; the inter-schema mappings are validated against the semantics of the data model and the syntax of the correspondence language. In this paper, we focus on how to employ a reasoning engine to validate spatio-temporal schemas and describe where the reasoning engine is plugged into our integration methodology. The validation phase distinguishes our integration methodology from other approaches. We shift the emphasis on automation from the a priori discovery to the a posteriori checking of the inter-schema mapping…
Semantic Mappings in Description Logics for Spatio-temporal Database Schema Integration
International audience; The interoperability problem arises in heterogeneous systems where different data sources coexist and there is a need for meaningful information sharing. One of the most representive realms of diversity of data representation is the spatio-temporal domain. Spatio-temporal data are most often described according to multiple and greatly diverse perceptions or viewpoints, using different terms and with heterogeneous levels of detail. Reconciling this heterogeneity to build a fully integrated database is known to be a complex and currently unresolved problem, and few formal approaches exist for the integration of spatio-temporal databases. The paper discusses the interope…