Comparative study of the systems of semantic integration of information: A survey

The emergence of new applications that need to share information between different sources of information, such as e-learning, e-commerce, e-government, and electronic libraries requires interoperability between information systems. The information systems are designed and developed by different organizations to be autonomous and heterogeneous sources which lead to multiple structuring formats and different interpretations of the same data. So to simplify data access, the virtual integration of heterogeneous, autonomous and distributed data sources is required based on the couple mediator-wrapper and founded on ontologies that provide a consensual terminology. The mediator masks the heterogeneity and distributes the data sources, while the adapter accommodates queries to data sources formats. Information systems exchange data and services thanks to the rich context that the semantic web offers. It aims to provide data understandable by humans and machines that perform automatic processing by software modules following a semantic enrichment. This article is a survey of the state of art that compare the previous works according to several criteria.