The Roles of Ontology and Metadata Registry for Interoperable Databases

摘要

In order to make multiple autonomous databases to inter-operate effectively, semantic heterogeneities have to be detected and resolved. Another difficulty is that users can be allowed to handle information easily from different heterogeneous databases that refer to the same real-world entity. To solve these problems, in this paper, I present an information integration system for interoperable databases using metadata registry and ontology. A metadata registry is a place to keep facts about characteristics of data that are necessary for data sharing and exchange in a specific domain. An ontology defines concepts and relations among concepts. The purpose of the proposed architecture is to define an information integration model, which combines characteristics of both standard specification of metadata registry and functionality of ontology for the concepts and relations.