Adopting Context Mediation in Information Integration to Resolve Semantic Heterogeneity in Distributed Environment

Ontology-based semantic information integration resolve the schema-level heterogeneity and part of data level heterogeneity between distributed data sources. But it is ubiquitous that schema semantics of information is identical while the interpretation of it varies with different context, and ontology-based semantic information integration can not resolve this context heterogeneity. By introducing context representation and context mediation to ontology based information integration, the attribute-level context heterogeneity can be detected and reconciled automatically, and hence a complete solution for semantic heterogeneity is formed. Through a concrete example, the context representation and the process in which the attribute-level context heterogeneity is reconciled during query processing are presented. This resolution can make up the deficiency of schema mapping based semantic information integration. With the architecture proposed in this paper the semantic heterogeneity solution is adaptive and extensive.