An Ontology-Based Approach for Semantic Conflict Resolution in Database Integration

An important task in database integration is toresolve data conflicts, on both schema-level and semantic-level.Especially difficult the latter is. Some existing ontology-basedapproaches have been criticized for their lack of domain generality andsemantic richness. With the aim to overcome these limitations, thispaper introduces a systematic approach for detecting and resolvingvarious semantic conflicts in heterogeneous databases, which includestwo important parts: a semantic conflict representation model based onour classification framework of semantic conflicts, and a methodologyfor detecting and resolving semantic conflicts based on this model.The system has been developed, experimental evaluations on whichindicate that this approach can resolve much of the semantic conflictseffectively, and keep independent of domains and integration patterns.