Ontology mapping for a new database integration model using an ontology-driven mediated warehousing approach

Ontology mapping is a technique that has become very useful for matching semantics between ontologies or schemas that were designed independently of each other. The main goal of the ontology mapping is to enable interoperability between applications in distributed information systems based on heterogeneous ontologies. To achieve this goal it is necessary to formally define mapping rules between local data sources and ontologies and the notion of a mapping between ontologies. In this study, the authors proposed a new mapping approach, so that the ontologies have to be linked to actual information sources in order to support the integration process. In this approach, first, for each incorporated information source, a local ontology is generated to describe its semantics as well as the resulting mappings between the source and the local ontology, then the local ontologies are mapped to a global ontology using the mapping rule.