A Hybrid Approach for Ontology Integration

The high proliferation of information on the World Wide Web (WWW) has made it necessary to make this huge information not only available to humans, but also to machines. Ontologies are widely being used to enrich the semantics of web, and corresponding technology developed to exploit them. Certainly, extracting information from various ontologies created independently is an important challenge for answering queries from web. In this paper, we propose a framework for ontology integration which is a hybrid of materialized (data warehouse) and virtual views. We have developed a prototype of the proposed framework. While much work is still ahead, our experiments so far indicate that the ideas used in this work are promising which may result in significant theoretical as well as practical contributions. 1