Is your Schema Good Enough to Answer my Query?

TL;DR

This paper proposes criteria based on semantic similarity, including coverage and flexibility, to evaluate the compatibility of existing ontologies with cross-domain queries and legacy schemas, enhancing data integration efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces new criteria and extended class weights for assessing ontology-schema compatibility, validated through practical project application.

Findings

Criteria effectively evaluate ontology-schema compatibility

Extended class weights improve compatibility accuracy

Method verified in real-world data integration project

Abstract

Ontology-based data integration has been one of the practical methodologies for heterogeneous legacy database integrated service construction. However, it is neither efficient nor economical to build the cross-domain ontology on top of the schemas of each legacy database for the specific integration application than to reuse the existed ontologies. Then the question lies in whether the existed ontology is compatible with the cross-domain queries and with all the legacy systems. It is highly needed an effective criteria to evaluate the compatibility as it limits the upbound quality of the integrated services. This paper studies the semantic similarity of schemas from the aspect of properties. It provides a set of in-depth criteria, namely coverage and flexibility to evaluate the compatibility among the queries, the schemas and the existing ontology. The weights of classes are extended to make precise compatibility computation. The use of such criteria in the practical project verifies the applicability of our method.