Enabling Cross Constraint Satisfaction in RDF-Based Heterogeneous Database Integration

The problem of database integration has been widely tackled through different approaches. While data transformation based systems, such as Data Warehouses, reached the acceptation of the industry during the 80's, in the last decade query translation based approaches have gained popularity given their adequacy to dynamic domains. While the former are based on gathering actual data in central repositories, the latter allow data to remain in the original databases. There still exist several issues to be tackled in query translation, mainly if no ad-hoc schema is described, such as problems with scalability and query processing. In this paper we describe a complete database integration and semantic mediation approach, borrowing techniques from both data transformation and local as view data translation methods, and addressing the cross referencing problem. This work has been carried out in the framework of ACGT (Advancing Clinico-Genomic Trials on Cancer) project, supported by the European Commission.