Semantic Information Gathering Approach for Heterogeneous Information Sources on WWW

The increasing demand for accessing heterogeneous information sources to support global applications and decision making requirements forces organizations to solve heterogeneity problems. One of the important problems stemming from accessing the heterogeneous data is semantic heterogeneity. A number of research efforts have been proposed to address this problem, ranging from mediator-based systems, description logic-based systems to content-descriptive metadata systems. In this paper, we propose a metadata dictionary as an assistant mechanism for solving semantic heterogeneity. The proposed metadata dictionary is designed based on domain ontology where the constituent components are defined in terms of object-oriented and set theory. An XML-based data model is employed to manipulate and express the metadata dictionary contents. The inherent flexibility of XML technology permits system-wide interoperability suitable for a Web-based environment.