Creating and Querying an Integrated Ontology for Molecular and Phenotypic Cereals Data

In this paper we describe the development of an ontology of molecular and phenotypic cereals data, realized by integrating existing public web databases with the database developed by the research group of the CEREALAB project (www.cerealab.org). This integration is obtained using the MOMIS system (Mediator envirOnment for Multiple Information Sources), a mediator based data integration system developed by the Database Group of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia(www.dbgroup.unimo.it). MOMIS performs information extraction and integration from both structured and semi-structured data sources in a semi-automatic way. Information integration is performed in a semi-automatic way, by exploiting the knowledge in a Common Thesaurus (defined by the framework) and the descriptions of source schemas with a combination of clustering and Description Logics techniques. The result of the integration process is a Global Virtual Schema (GVV) of the underlying data sources for which mapping rules and integrity constraints are specified to handle heterogeneity. Each GVV element is annotated w.r.t. the WordNet lexical database(wordnet.princeton.edu). The GVV can be queried transparently with regards to integrated data sources using an easy to use graphical interface regardless of the specific languages of the source databases.