An Adaptive Semantic Framework to Support Multiple User Viewpoints over Multiple Databases

A global domain Ontology is often proposed as a means to semantically interlink local heterogeneous database resources within a domain. The main advantage is that users need only understand one interface pertaining to the global ontology rather than to understand each of the local database resource interfaces. However, a global domain Ontology may contain considerable complexity, in order to cover increasing numbers of heterogeneous local data resources. Further, some users may not be familiar with the full global model in order to pose and refine their queries under the strict constraints of a single conceptualisation. The development and application of a flexible approach to derive more targeted views, oriented to different types of users and applications, is reported here. The key design challenge tackled here was to derive and constrain user views of the global view, in such a way that the quality of the global view model is maintained in each user view, and that each user view can be accurately mapped to the global view.