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RESEARCH PRODUCT

A Web Centric Semantic Mediation Approach for Spatial Information Systems

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International audience; Semantic mediation is increasingly at the heart of the design of emerging webbased information systems, particularly spatial information systems thatrequire the integration or interoperation of a collection of heterogeneousdata sources. Ontologies are increasingly used to represent agreed semantic ofapplications by providing formal description models and related tools toexplicitly specify the conceptual entities of an application. Past research intraditional database integration has identified key issues in the resolution ofvarious structural and semantic conflicts. Recent research effort has extendedthis early research to address the interoperability of spatial informationsystems. In this paper, we present an ontology based semantic reconciliationand interoperability methodology of heterogeneous spatial information systemsbased on three types of ontological components: 1) global mediation entities(GME) derived from a shared ontology, 2) cooperative semantics entities (CSE)which are used for inter-context mediation, and 3) local ontologiesrepresenting entities of the local data sources. The shared ontology providesthe generic ontological terms that can be refined by defining ontologicalagreements to adapt the structure and the intended meaning of the components ofthe shared ontology to the semantic characteristics of a cooperative datasource. Context transformation functions are used to achieve semanticinformation integration by mapping cooperative semantic entities to the localentities or to the entities of another cooperation context. We use OWL ontologydescription language to describe the structure and the logical domainproperties of the global and cooperative semantic entities. The reasoning andinference capabilities of OWL are used to allow automatic or semi-automaticprocessing of the mediation approach.