An XML Schema-based Semantic Data Integration

Cyber-infrastructures for scientific and engineering applications require integrating heterogeneous legacy data in different formats and from various domains. Such data integration raises challenging issues: (1) Support for multiple independently-managed schemas, (2) Ease of schema evolution, and (3) Simple schema mappings. In order to address these issues, we propose a novel approach to semantic integration of scientific data which uses XML schemas and RDF-based schema mappings. In this approach, XML schema allows scientists to manage data models intuitively and to use commodity XML DBMS tools. A simple RDF-based ontological representation scheme is used for only structural relations among independently-managed XML schemas from different institutes or domains We present the design and implementation of a prototype system developed for the national cyber-environment