Uma abordagem semi-automática para geração incremental de correspondências entre ontologias

Abstract

The discovery of semantic correspondences between schemas is an important task for different fields of applications such as data integration, data warehousing and data mashup. In most cases, the data sources involved are heterogeneous and dynamic, making it even harder the performance of that task. Ontologies are being used in order to define common vocabulary used to describe the elements of the schemas involved in a particular application. The problem of matching between ontologies, or ontology matching, consists in the discovery of correspondences between terms of vocabularies (represented by ontologies) used between the various applications. The solutions proposed in the literature, despite being fully automatic have heuristic nature, and may produce non-satisfactory results. The problem intensifies when dealing with large data sources. The purpose of this paper is to propose a method for generation and incremental refinement of correspondences between ontologies. The proposed approach makes use of filtering techniques of ontologies, as well as user feedback to support the generation and refining these matches. For validation purposes, a tool was developed and experiments were conducted