A schema and ontology-aided intelligent information integration

The research issues of intelligent information integration have become ubiquitous and critically important in e-business (EB) with the increasing dependence on Internet/Intranet and information technology (IT). Accessing the intelligent information sources separately without integration may lead to the chaos of information requested. It is also not cost-effective in EB settings. A common general way to deal with heterogeneity problems in traditional III is to create a common data model. The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) has been the standard data document format for exchanging information on the Web. XML only deals with the structural heterogeneity; it can barely handle the semantic heterogeneity. Ontologies are regarded as an important and natural means to represent the implicit semantics and relationships in the real world. And they are used to assist to reach semantic interoperability in III in this research. In this paper, we provide a generic construct orientation no ad hoc method to generate the global schema to enable the web-based alternative to traditional III. We provide a wiser query method over multiple intelligent information sources by applying global-as-view (GAV) and local-as-view (LAV) approach with the use of ontology to enhance both structural and semantic interoperability of the underlying intelligent information sources. We construct a prototype implementing the method to provide a proof on the validity and feasibility.