Integrating databases in Internet

Abstract

One of the difficult problems in database integration is to find and resolve the semantic heterogeneity of the component databases. In this paper, we present a methodology for database integration by using an ontology. The ontology is mainly used to help the designers to understand the semantics of database objects. Anyone who wants to share his database with others should provide an export schema of the database and a mapping between the schema and one or many standard ontologies. According to this mapping, the designer can easily find and resolve the semantic heterogeneity of the component databases and build an integrated schema.