Information integration using contextual knowledge and ontology merging

With the advances in telecommunications, and the introduction of the Internet, information systems achieved physical connectivity, but have yet to establish logical connectivity. Lack of logical connectivity is often inviting disaster as in the case of Mars Orbiter, which was lost because one team used metric units, the other English while exchanging a critical maneuver data. In this Thesis, we focus on the two intertwined sub problems of logical connectivity, namely data extraction and data interpretation in the domain of heterogeneous information systems. The first challenge, data extraction, is about making it possible to easily exchange data among semi-structured and structured information systems. We describe the design and implementation of a general purpose, regular expression based Cameleon wrapper engine with an integrated capabilities-aware planner/optimizer/executioner. The second challenge, data interpretation, deals with the existence of heterogeneous contexts, whereby each source of information and potential receiver of that information may operate with a different context, leading to large-scale semantic heterogeneity. We extend the existing formalization of the COIN framework with new logical formalisms and features to handle larger set of heterogeneities between data sources. This extension, named Extended Context Interchange (ECOIN), is motivated by our analysis of financial information systems that indicates that there are three fundamental types of heterogeneities in data sources: contextual, ontological, and temporal. While COIN framework was able to deal with the contextual heterogeneities, ECOIN framework expands the scope to include ontological heterogeneities as well.

Department dc:contributor.department

Sloan School of Management.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2003

Author dc:creator

• Firat, Aykut

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Stuart E. Madnick.

• Sloan School of Management.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/30013

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/30013