Ontology-based Metadata Dictionary for Integrating Heterogeneous
Information Sources on the WWW
Ngamnij Arch-int
ngamnij@kku.ac.th
PERAPHON SOPHATSATHIT
Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science,
Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, 10330, Thailand
Peraphon.S@chula.ac.th
Yuefeng Li
School of Software Engineering and Data Communications,
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
y2.li@qut.edu.au
Abstract
Semantic heterogeneity has always been one of the most important problems to
overcome. A number of systems have been proposed to address this problem,
ranging from mediator-based systems to description logic-based systems to
content-descriptive metadata systems. In this paper, we propose an
ontology-based metadata dictionary as a basis for solving semantic
heterogeneity. First, the ontology-based metadata dictionary is modeled on
the basis of a bottom-up design approach. Next, an XMLbased data model is
employed to manipulate and express the metadata dictionary contents to
demonstrate how the proposed ontology-based metadata dictionary can be
applied to a practical implementation. We also present the transformation of
the ontology-based metadata dictionary into an XML-based metadata dictionary
representation. Finally, the proposed approach is applied to a practical case
study along with some related query processing to demonstrate the viability
of model realisation.
Keywords: Heterogeneous information sources, domain
ontology, XML-based metadata dictionary, query processing.