An Ontology-Based Data Integration System for Data and Multimedia Sources

Data integration is the problem of combining data residing at distributed heterogeneous sources, including multimedia sources, and providing the user with a unified view of these data. Ontology based Data Integration involves the use of ontology(s) to effectively combine data and information from multiple heterogeneous sources [16]. Ontologies, with respect to the integration of data sources, can be used for the identification and association of semantically correspond- ing information concepts, i.e. for the definition of semantic mappings among concepts of the information sources. MOMIS is a Data Integration System which performs in-formation extraction and integration from both structured and semi- structured data sources [6]. In [5] MOMIS was extended to manage “traditional” and “multimedia” data sources at the same time. STASIS is a comprehensive application suite which allows enterprises to simplify the mapping process between data schemas based on semantics [1]. Moreover, in STASIS, a general framework to perform Ontology-driven Semantic Mapping has been pro-posed [7]. This paper describes the early effort to combine the MOMIS and the STASIS frameworks in order to obtain an effective approach for Ontology-Based Data Integration for data and multimedia sources.