Observer: an approach for query processing in global informationsystems based on interoperation across pre-existing ontologies

摘要

The huge number of autonomous and heterogeneous data repositoriesaccessible on the “global information infrastructure” makesit impossible for users to be aware of the locationsstructure/organization, query languages and semantics of the data invarious repositories. There is a critical need to complement currentbrowsing, navigational and information retrieval techniques with astrategy that focuses on information content and semantics. In anystrategy that focuses on information content, the most critical problemis that of different vocabularies used to describe similar informationacross domains. We discuss a scalable approach for vocabulary sharing.The objects in the repositories are represented as intensionaldescriptions by preexisting ontologies expressed in Description Logicscharacterizing information in different domains. User queries arerewritten by using interontology relationships to obtain semanticspreserving translations across the ontologies