Ontology-based Data Integration Ontology-based Data Integration

Nowadays, different areas of large modern enterprises use different database management systems to store and search their critical data. Competition, evolving technology, geographical distribution, and the inevitable growing decentralization contribute to this diversity. All of these databases are very important to an enterprise, but the their different interfaces make their administration difficult. Therefore, recovering information through a common interface becomes crucial to realize, for instance, the full value of data contained in the databases (Hass & Lin, 2002). In the 1990s, the term federated database emerged to characterize techniques for proving an integrating data access, giving a set of distributed, heterogeneous, and autonomous databases (Busse, Kutsche, Leser & Weber, 1999; Litwin, Mark, & Roussoupoulos, 1990; Sheth & Larson, 1990). Even these concepts are rather wellknown today, a brief introduction would clarify their meanings in the context of our paper. They are as follows: