MostoDE: A tool to exchange data amongst semantic-web ontologies

A semantic-web ontology, simply known as ontology, comprises a data model and data that should comply with it. Due to their distributed nature, there exist a large amount of heterogeneous ontologies, and a strong need for exchanging data amongst them, i.e., populating a target ontology using data th...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Rivero, Carlos R., Hernández Salmerón, Inmaculada Concepción, Ruiz Cortés, David, Corchuelo Gil, Rafael
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión enviada para evaluación y publicación
Fecha de publicación:2013
País:España
Institución:Universidad de Sevilla (US)
Repositorio:idUS. Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla
OAI Identifier:oai:idus.us.es:11441/66824
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/11441/66824
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2013.01.037
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Data exchange
Semantic Web
Executable mappings
SPARQL
Descripción
Sumario:A semantic-web ontology, simply known as ontology, comprises a data model and data that should comply with it. Due to their distributed nature, there exist a large amount of heterogeneous ontologies, and a strong need for exchanging data amongst them, i.e., populating a target ontology using data that come from one or more source ontologies. Data exchange may be implemented using correspondences that are later transformed into executable mappings; however, exchanging data amongst ontologies is not a trivial task, so tools that help software engineers to exchange data amongst ontologies are a must. In the literature, there are a number of tools to automatically generate executable mappings; unfortunately, they have some drawbacks, namely: 1) they were designed to work with nested-relational data models, which prevents them to be applied to ontologies; 2) they require their users to handcraft and maintain their executable mappings, which is not appealing; or 3) they do not attempt to identify groups of correspondences, which may easily lead to incoherent target data. In this article, we present MostoDE, a tool that assists software engineers in generating SPARQL executable mappings and exchanging data amongst ontologies. The salient features of our tool are as follows: it allows to automate the generation of executable mappings using correspondences and constraints; it integrates several systems that implement semantic-web technologies to exchange data; and it provides visual aids for helping software engineers to exchange data amongst ontologies.