An Ontology-Based Approach to Web Information Integration

Information integration and interoperability among information sources are related problems that have received significant attention since early days of computer information processing. The objective of Web information integration system is to promote Web information collection, sharing and retrieval in distributed and heterogeneous environment. This paper puts forward an ontology-based approach to Web information integration, which promises better access to relevant information by producing a global domain ontology that is used for establishing semantic connections among the local autonomous information sources as well as for retrieving those sources. In this approach, an up-bottom information integration method with a semantic transformation adapter framework is proposed to solve both the semantic heterogeneities and the query answering problems.