Semantic Integration of Heterogeneous Databases in Multidatabase System

Abstract

Interoperability not only has to resolve the differences in data structures, it also has to deal with semantic heterogeneity. Taking semantically heterogeneous databases as the prototypical situation, the presented work describes how ontology (in the traditional metaphysical sense) can contribute to delivering a more efficient and effective process of matching by providing a framework for the analysis, and so the basis for a methodology. An algorithm is proposed which detects the semantically related classes from heterogeneous database and a set of integrating operators are defined to integrate local schemas based on the semantic relevance of their classes. It provides a model independent representation of virtual classes of the global schema.