Ontology mapping composition for query transformation on distributed environments

Semantic heterogeneity should be dealt with for supporting automated information sharing process between information systems in distributed environments. To do so, traditional approaches have been based on explicit mapping between ontologies obtained from human experts of the particular domain. However, the manual tasks are very expensive, so that it is difficult to obtain ontology mappings between all possible pairs of the information systems. Thereby, in this paper, we propose a semantic distributed system to make the existing mapping information sharable and exchangeable. It means that the proposed system can collect the existing mappings and aggregate them. Consequently, we can estimate the ontology mappings in an indirect manner. In particular, this paper focuses on query propagation on the distributed networks. Once we have found the indirect mapping between the systems, the queries can be efficiently transformed to automatically exchange knowledge between heterogeneous information systems. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.