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5.3 Ontology Mapping Tools
Ontology mapping approaches may solve the
problem of aligning local and global schemas,
avoiding (or at least reducing) the need of a non-
ontologist user to decide which OWL constructors to
use for integrating and reconciling information.
Despite local schemas may contain few
properties (datasheet columns), mapping them to
large global ontologies may be largely benefited
from the use of these tools, as ilustrated by
(Rodriguez, et al., 2011).
However, the automatic discovery of mappings
could exacerbate the problem of reasoning in large
amounts of data producing an excess of mappings
between schemas that are not used to answer the
question that motivates integration.
6 CONCLUSIONS
The need of an agile process for information
integration has become more evident in large
organizations, as much as for trivial questions as for
building indicators that involve information
managed by external organizations.
We presented a method supported by current
semantic technologies that provide information
integration of heterogeneous data sources. In
scenarios where data is provided in semi-structured
formats and varies over time, our method matches
the results obtained by other robust mediator
architectures in a cost-effective manner.
Nevertheless, information integration requires a
deep understanding of ontological representations in
order to perform a proper integration and
reconciliation, despite the facilities provided by
current tools.
Despite semantic web languages and protocols as
well as current semantic technologies are mature
enough for enabling information integration there
are still some issues that must be addressed. For
instance, by providing scalable reasoning on large
amounts of data, friendly interfaces for non-ontology
experts and configuration options for reasoners that
allows making the Closed World Assumption when
the information is complete.
Solving these problems will allow taking
advantage of ontology mapping tools for discovering
all possible alignments between local and global
schemas. Furthermore, it will be possible to select
automatically the domain ontology that better suits
(best scored matches) to a set of local schemas.
In this exercise we classified OWL constructors
according to their usage in the integration stage, but
they can be further classified according to the
heterogeneity type they address, in order to facilitate
user’s adoption.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Authors thank to Tecnologico de Monterrey and
CONACYT for sponsoring this research through
grants 0020PRY058 and CB-2011-01-167460,
respectively.
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