Managing ontology based integration systems using dependencies

Ontology-based information integration systems have been proposed to solve the problem of combining data residing at autonomous and heterogeneous sources. For such ontology based solutions to succeed in an industrial context, the integration ontology and mappings need to be managed to allow them to evolve as the data sources evolve. This research has developed a technique to support the management of ontology-based integration systems by modeling the dependencies that arise in the system. This paper describes the management problem, a solution, an industrial case study using dependency modeling and an evaluation mechanism.