Ontology-based Data Integration with MASTRO-I for Configuration and Data Management at SELEX Sistemi Integrati

In this paper, we report on a case study conducted with the MASTRO-I system at SELEX Sistemi Integrati, a world’s leading company in the provision of integrated defence and air traffic systems. MASTRO-I is a tool for ontology-based data integration that combines advanced services for reasoning over ontologies with the capabilities provided by relational data federation tools, used for wrapping physical data sources. In our case study, we focused on the Configuration and Data Management (C&DM) domain, where data concerning the design and the production of components of complex systems are combined with data pertaining customer support and obsolescence monitoring services. At the current stage, C&DM data in SELEX-SI are fragmented over various and autonomous sources, managed by different systems under heterogeneous data models, and data integration is conducted manually by domain experts. To simplify and automatize this process, we developed an ontology for the C&DM domain and customized the MASTRO-I system to integrate C&DM data through such ontology. The effectiveness of the ontology representation, combined with the efficiency of the integration features of MASTRO-I, compared with the current manual integration process, evidenced the benefits achieved by SELEX-SI from this solution.