The Information Integrator: using Semantic Technology to provide a single view to distributed data

Abstract

For the integration of data that resides in autonomous data sources Software AG uses ontologies. Data source ontologies describe the data sources themselves. Business ontologies provide an integrated view of the data. FLogic rules are used to describe mappings between data objects in data source or business ontologies. Furthermore, FLogic is used as the query language. FLogic rules are perfectly suited to describe the mappings between objects and their properties. Some of these mapping rules can be generated automatically from the data sources metadata. Some patterns do frequently reoccur in user-defined mapping rules, for instance rules which establish inverse object relations or rules which create new object relations based on the objects’ property values. Within our first project access to information is still typical data retrieval and not so much knowledge inference. Therefore, a lot of effort in this project concentrated on query functionality and even more on performance. But these are only first steps. To strengthen this development and to get more experience in this field Software AG recently joined several EU research projects which all have a focus on exploitation of semantic technology with concrete business cases.