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RDF representation of metadata for semantic integration of corporate information resources
Abstract
In this paper, we will discuss the use of RDF-based metadata to achieve the semantic integration of corporate information resources. This approach uses the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Resource Description Framework Schema (RDFS) for the representation of all metadata characterizing the content of the information source as well as an interlinqua for standardizing all communications between system components. We will discuss the integration architecture and describe the metadata structures used. We will also describe how metadata facilitates information browsing and a practical approach to query optimization.
... (i) The Relational.OWL [11] currently supporting only MySQL and DB2 database management systems (DBMS). The generated ontology contains classes: Database, [14,15] extract the real world relations from the RDB structure, and unable to reconstruct the original schema of the RDB. ...
This article describes the method of integrating information systems of an aircraft factory with the production capacity planning system based on the ontology merging. The ontological representation is formed for each relational database (RDB) of integrated information systems. The ontological representation is formed in the process of analyzing the structure of the relational database of the information system (IS). Based on the ontological representations merging the integrating data model is formed. The integrating data model is a mechanism for semantic integration of data sources.
... have shown a Web Service solution with OWL that transforms relational database data from a local model to HL7-xml (standard for medical information representation). The other [39] have shown a similar solution by use of a wrapper between a local model and a global representation, where the rules in the wrapper is implemented in OWL. ...
... Most components of the ontology are elided, because the figure can't hold them. But they are all detailed defined in the ontology RDFS [13]: all the metadata elements are defined into properties; all the refinements are defined into subproperties; and all encoding schema are defined into constraints. The datatype and cardinality are also defined. ...
Semantic search is valuable and has big developing foreground. Metadata has become one of the most important technologies supporting information searching in the last twenty years. Metadata provide the structured and standard information about its describing object including the content introduction, the background, the physical property and the using restriction etc. Ontology is a useful tool to endue the computer with understanding the semantic of data. In this paper, an ontology based metadata scheme and semantic search system are put forward. A prototype of the semantic search system with an ontology mapping server is realized.
... A rule-based XML syntax called LMX (Language for Mapping XML) has been applied by [33] underlining its applicability for the tool-assisted mapping generation by human integration engineers. Other approaches on integrating XML use datalog syntax [18], RDF/XML [34] and XQuery [32] as mapping languages. ...
RDF is used as a central building block for the Semantic Web. Considering providers of learning resources, it is com-monplace to store and exchange meta-information in XML rather than RDF. Instead of transforming meta-data arte-facts into RDF, we integrate these meta-data by translating users' queries issued against RDF into queries over XML meta-data. We demonstrate the applicability of our query translation method in a concrete application scenario taken from the educational domain.
... Semantic integration of corporate information resources is the main topic in (Barrett, Jones, Yuan, Sawaya, Uschold, Adams & Folger 2002), where Barrett et al. use RDF as a standardized communication language between all components. The main difference to our approach is also their mapping of data resulting from queries to existing ontologies, which describe real-world relationships among objects. ...
One of the research flelds which has recently gained much scientiflc interest within the database commu- nity are Peer-to-Peer databases, where peers have the autonomy to decide whether to join or to leave an information sharing environment at any time. Such volatile data nodes may appear shortly, collect or de- liver some data, and disappear again. It even can not be assured that a peer joins the network ever again. In this paper we introduce a representation format fort both, schema and data information based on the Web Ontology Language OWL. According to the ad- vantages of the Semantic Web we are thus able to represent and to transfer every schema and data com- ponent of a database to any partner, without having to deflne a data and schema exchange format explic- itly.
... Integrating information from heterogeneous sources continues to be a formidable challenge. Virtual data warehousing and semantic web technologies are promising trends in this area [5,6,7]. The military use of airplanes introduces further requirements where the product boundaries are extended by information and communications technologies to link the airplane with a global intelligence and information infrastructure. ...
This chapter identifies new information management challenges from various segments of the aerospace industry: product data management, distributed and collaborative design, supply chain management, e-business and e-commerce, production planning and control, maintenance and support, battle management C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance & reconnaissance), and information assurance. The aerospace industry poses significant challenges to information management unlike any other industry. Data management challenges arising from different segments of the aerospace business are identified through illustrative scenarios.
... When the links are established, the integration issue is transformed into how to retrieve data through the formalized semantic models. In recent study on information integration, the formalized model mentioned above often refers to the formal ontology [14]. Differing from the dictionary and concept model mentioned above, 1) formal ontology defines relations, asserts and axioms for concepts cited by terms, and dynamically builds the relationship between these terms through logical reasoning, whereas dictionary defines fixed, limited number of relationships between terms; 2) formal ontology doesn't depend on any specific application, but depend on the understanding of some actual domain. ...
... If different repositories are indexed to different ontologies, then a semantically integrated information access system could deploy mappings between different ontologies and retrieve answers from multiple repositories. See [Barrett et al 2002] for an example of this technique applied to databases. More sophisticated applications of ontology-based search require more formal ontologies. ...
The goal of having networks of seamlessly connected people, software agents and IT systems remains elusive. Early integration efforts focused on connectivity at the physical and syntactic layers. Great strides were made; there are many commercial tools available, for example to assist with enterprise application integration. It is now recognized that physical and syntactic connectivity is not adequate. A variety of research systems have been developed addressing some of the semantic issues. In this paper, we argue that ontologies in particular and semantics-based technologies in general will play a key role in achieving seamless connectivity. We give a detailed introduction to ontologies, summarize the current state of the art for applying ontologies to achieve semantic connectivity and highlight some key challenges.
... Other mapping approaches which have influenced the design of D2R MAP, are developed by the AIFB Institute, University of Karlsruhe, Germany [4] and by Boeing, Philadelphia, USA [5]. It is planned to extend D2R MAP with conditional mappings and more sophisticated value transformation abilities. ...
The vision of the Semantic Web is to give data on the web a welldefined meaning by representing it in RDF and linking it to commonly accepted ontologies. Most formatted data today is stored in relational databases. To be able to use this data on the Semantic Web, we need a flexible but easy to use mechanism to map relational data into RDF. The poster presents D2R MAP, a declarative language to describe mappings between relational database schemata and OWL ontologies.
The basic principles of data consolidation of the production capacities planning system of the large industrial enterprise are formulated in this article. The article describes an example of data consolidation process of two relational databases (RDBs). The proposed approach involves using of ontological engineering methods for extracting metadata (ontologies) from RDB schemas. The research contains an analysis of approaches to the consolidation of RDBs at different levels. The merging of extracted metadata is used to organize the data consolidation process of several RDBs. The difference between the traditional and the proposed data consolidation algorithms is shown, their advantages and disadvantages are considered. The formalization of the integrating data model as system of extracted metadata of RDB schemas is described. Steps for integrating data model building in the process of ontology merging is presented. An example of the integrating data model building as settings for data consolidation process confirms the possibility of practical use of the proposed approach in the data consolidation process.
The article describes an example of data consolidation between two relational databases (RDB). The proposed approach involves using of ontological engineering methods for extracting ontologies from RDB data models. The merging of the resulting ontologies is used to organize the information interaction between the RDB. The difference between the traditional and the proposed data consolidation algorithms is shown, their advantages and disadvantages are considered.
Many large organizations have their data and processing spread across multiple independent database applications. These data
sources, with their own schemas, need to inter-operate to meet new requirements, both within and across organizations. In
this paper, we propose a vision of an ontology-enabled database management systems (called OeDBMS) so that the end users can
co-relate and integrate ontologies associated with individual sources and extract, co-relate and integrate data from different
sources. We propose the architecture and ontology model for OeDBMS. We propose many useful extensions to the RDF/S-based ontology
models that are emerging as standards, and provide a graph-based abstraction for the model. This becomes a basis for defining
many useful ontology operators and an ontology query language for browsing, searching, matching and maintaining ontologies.
We also address the need for ontology evolution by providing temporal support for ontology.
Based on a discussion of data understanding hierarchy, this paper reviews a state of the art of existing enterprise information integration solutions from semantic perspective. We divide existing approaches into three categories: programming semantic-based integration, syntax schema-based integration, and declarative semantic-based Integration, and evaluate the approaches in each category by comparing the method used to describe and explain the data, and the topology structure of the data connected. Based on the results of our analysis we summarize the state-of-the-art in semantic enterprise information integration and give the tendencies of further research.
Challenges related to documenting and reconstructing computer-assisted decision processes include the selection of information granularity, design of information gathering and reconstruction mechanisms, evaluation of reconstruction value, and storage and computational costs. This article surveys these challenges and explicates an approach to designing and prototyping an evaluation framework for decisions based on image inspection. The framework explored here allows users to analyze storage and computational costs of information gathering as a function of information granularity and then assesses the potential value of decision process reconstructions. We illustrate how evaluations of decision process reconstructions could potentially improve our understanding of future archival needs by simultaneously documenting, preserving and reconstructing computer-assisted decision processes, and evaluating and forecasting computational and storage requirements of the documentation and reconstruction processes over time.
Planning processes in civil engineering are characterized by a large number of participants and a high amount of planning
information stored in distributed and heterogeneous partial models. A main goal of the presented project is to provide engineers
with integrated views on the relevant technical planning information. To realise this, two aspects have to be considered:
access level integration and semantic level integration. For the integration of partial models on the access level, different
approaches like Web Services and mobile agents have been developed in the last several years. An agent-based approach for
model integration is presented in the first part of the paper. However, in this context the core problem is the implicit and
frequently inconsistent semantics of the information. Thus, the second focus of the paper is on the interoperability on the
semantic level. To provide engineers with integrated transparent views on the model data, domain specific ontologies and mappings
between these ontologies and different database schemas have been developed. A combined approach for the integration of distributed
heterogeneous partial models in civil engineering planning processes on the access level and the semantic level is presented
in this paper.
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2004 The Semantic Web envisions a portion of the World-Wide Web in which the underlying data is machine understandable and can thus be exploited for improved querying, aggregation, and interaction. However, despite the great potential of this vision and numerous efforts, the growth of the Semantic Web has been stymied by the lack of incentive to create content, and the high cost of doing so.The goal of this dissertation is to enable and motivate non-technical people to both utilize and contribute content for the Semantic Web. As the foundation for our work, we identify three design principles that are essential for producing a successful Semantic Web system: (1) Instant Gratification---provide an immediate, tangible benefit to users. (2) Gradual Adoption---offer such benefit even when the system has few users. (3) Ease of Use---be simple enough for a non-technical person to use.We then design mechanisms and theory that support these principles in the construction of two novel systems: MANGROVE, a community Semantic Web system, and Semantic Email, a system for leveraging declarative content to automate email-mediated tasks.First, we describe MANGROVE's architecture and explain how its explicit publish and feedback mechanisms can provide instant gratification to content authors. In addition, we describe several novel semantic services that motivate the annotation of HTML content by consuming semantic information. We show how these services can provide tangible benefit to authors even when pages are only sparsely annotated. Furthermore, we demonstrate how seeding and inline annotation with our lightweight annotation syntax can bolster gradual adoption in MANGROVE.Second, we introduce a paradigm for Semantic Email and describe a broad class of semantic email processes (SEPs). In support of instant gratification, these automated processes offer tangible productivity gains on a wide variety of email-mediated activities. To manage these processes, we define two formal models for specifying the desired behavior of a SEP. We show that computing the optimal message handling policies for these models is intractable in general, but identify key restrictions that enable these problems to be solved in polynomial time while still enabling a range of useful functionality. We then address a number of significant problems related to SEP usage by non-technical people. In particular, we design a high-level language for SEP templates that greatly simplifies the process of specifying and invoking a new SEP. In addition, we show that it is possible to verify, in polynomial time, that a given template will always produce a valid instantiation, and demonstrate how to generate explanations for the SEP's behavior in polynomial time. Finally, we describe how to meet our principles of gradual adoption and ease of use via a template-based semantic email server that functions seamlessly for participants with any mail client and with no a priori knowledge of semantic email.Both systems have been fully implemented and deployed in a real-world environment, allowing us to report on practical experience gained with actual users. Overall, this work produces two novel, usable systems, as well as insights and techniques that can direct future Semantic Web systems.
Relational.OWL ist ein Verfahren, mit dem relationale Datenbestände automatisch in ihre Semantic Web Repräsentation überführt werden können. Dieses Verfahren ermöglicht es somit, Anwendungen des Semantic Web, auf diese vormals relationalen Daten zuzugreifen. Nachdem eine derartige Darstellung aber keine echte Semantik enthält, zeigen wir zusätzlich wie die Daten unter Benutzung einer abgeschlossenen RDF-Anfragesprache, zu Instanzen einer Ziel-Ontologie umgewandelt werden können. Mit den aktuellen Methoden des Semantic Web, kann ein relationaler Datenbestand nach seiner Umwandlung in RDF nicht wieder bis zu seiner ursprünglichen Datenquelle zurückverfolgt werden. Deshalb führen wir in dieser Arbeit zusätzlich ein neuartiges URI-Schema ein, mit dem sich relationale Datenbanken, einschließlich ihrer Daten- und Schema-Komponenten eindeutig kennzeichnen lassen. In this thesis we present Relational.OWL, a technique to automatically convert a relational database into a Semantic Web representation, enabling Semantic Web applications to access data actually stored in relational databases using their own built-in functionality. Since this representation does not result in objects containing real semantics, we additionally show how to create mappings from the relational model to a target ontology using an arbitrary closed RDF query language. Using current Semantic Web techniques, a formerly relational data item, once converted to its Semantic Web representation, can neither be identified unambiguously, nor be backtracked to its original storage location in the relational database. We hence introduce a novel URI scheme for identifying not only databases, but also their schema and data components like tables or columns, giving us the possibility to specify the exact and identifying storage location of any data item in its original data source.
Today, the Internet can be seen as a global market place populated by a huge number of providers and consumers that exchange data from a wide range of domains. The upcoming flood of data inside the World Wide Web forces the introduction of new technologies that can reduce this information overload. Data querying is a routine practice for many on-line services. Informative query answering may improve on-line shopping service by incorporating data integration techniques. In this paper, we propose an approach for informative query answering using resource description framework query language (RDQL) and resource description framework (RDF). The RDF is used to represent all instance information. RDQL queries RDF documents using SQL-alike syntax. And the mediator/wrapper approach is used for integrating heterogeneous data
HP Labs developed the Jena toolkit to make it easier to develop applications that use the semantic Web information model and languages. Jena is a Java application programming interface that is available as an open-source download from www.hpl.hp.com/semweb/jena-top.html.
In recent years service-‐orientation has increasingly been adopted as one of the main approaches for developing complex distributed systems out of reusable components called services. Realizing the potential benefits of this software engineering approach requires semi-‐automated and automated techniques and tools for searching or locating services, selecting the suitable ones, composing them into complex processes, resolving heterogeneity issues through process and data mediation, and reduce other tedious yet recurrent tasks with minimal manual effort. Just as semantics has brought significant benefits to search, integration and analysis of data, semantics is also seen as a key to achieving a greater level of automation to service orientation. This has lead to research and development, as well as standardization efforts on semantic Web services. Activities related to semantic Web services have involved developing conceptual models or ontologies, algorithms and engines that could support machines in semi-‐automatically or automatically discovering, selecting, composing
The Web is gradually evolving as provider of services along with its text and image processing functions. Web services markup is proposed in the Defense advance research project agency's agent markup language (DAML) family of semantic Webmarkup languages. The markup provide an agent-independant declarative API to capture the data and metadata associated with a service. Sharing, reuse, composition, mapping and succint local Web service markup is facilitated by the exploitation of ontologies by markup. A wide variety of agent technologies for automated Web services discovery, execution, composition and interoperation is enabled by this markup.
s Service (CAS) registry number (7439-97-6), "raw" CAS number (dashes removed---7439976), and common name ("quicksilver "). Within an ontology, each class has one or more slots, where each slot has a conceptual domain name with a canonical value domain over which all agents communicate when referring to that slot. This mapping problem has several manifestations, which we relate roughly in the order they have been addressed in the literature (insofar as they are addressed at all): ffl Traditional: Mapping between schemas can take place by imposing a view on that information and/or defining functions to translate the data from one value domain to another, as is currently done in relational databases, e.g., [9]. This type of mapping provides little support for semantics, but rather relies on the structure of the data. ffl Ontology-based: A common ontology is defined with well-specified semantics for the concepts it describes. Mapping between a schema and an ontology is done on a semantic...
. The World Wide Web (WWW) can be viewed as the largest multimedia database that has ever existed. However, its support for query answering and automated inference is very limited. Metadata and domain specific ontologies were proposed by several authors to solve this problem. We developed Ontobroker which uses formal ontologies to extract, reason, and generate metadata in the WWW. The paper describes the formalisms and tools for formulating queries, defining ontologies, extracting metadata, and generating metadata in the format of the Resource Description Framework (RDF), as recently proposed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These methods provide a means for semantic based query handling even if the information is spread over several sources. Furthermore, the generation of RDF descriptions enables the exploitation of the ontological information in RDF-based applications.
Three Approaches for Knowledge Sharing, KAW 1999 http://sern.ucalgary.ca
- M Uschold
- R Jasper
- P Clark
M. Uschold, R. Jasper, P. Clark, Three Approaches for Knowledge Sharing, KAW
1999 http://sern.ucalgary.ca/KSI/KAW/KAW99/papers/Uschold1/final-nr-story.pdf
[12] WordNet http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/