MOMIS: an Ontology-based Information Integration System(software)

The Mediator Environment for Multiple Information Sources (Momis), developed by the database research group at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, aims to construct synthesized, integrated descriptions of information coming from multiple heterogeneous sources. Our goal is to provide users with a global virtual view (GVV) of information sources, independent oftheir location or their data’s heterogeneity.An open source version of the MOMIS system was released on April 2010 by the spin-off DATARIVER (www.datariver.it)Such a view conceptualizes the underlying domain; you can think of it as an ontology describing the sources involved. The Semantic Web exploits semantic markups to provide Web ages with machine-readable definitions. It thus relieson the a priori existence of ontologies that represent the domains associated with the given information sources. This approachrelies on the selected reference ontology’s accuracy, but we find that most ontologies in common use are generic and that theannotation phase (in which semantic annotations connect Web page parts to ontology items) causes a loss of semantics. Byinvolving the sources themselves, our approach builds an ontology that more precisely represents the domain. Moreover,the GVV is annotated according to a lexical ontology, which provides an easily understandable meaning to content.