Ontological Approach for Information Discovery in Internet Databases

Mourad Ouzzani, Boualem Benatallah, Athman Bouguettaya

Abstract: The Internet has solved the age-old problem of network connectivity and thus enabling the potential access to, and data sharing among large numbers of databases. However, enabling users to discover useful information requires an adequate metadata infrastructure that must scale with the diversity and dynamism of both users' interests and Internet accessible databases. In this paper, we present a model that partitions the information space into a distributed, highly specialized domain ontologies. We also introduce inter-ontology relationships to cater for user-based interests across ontologies defined over Internet databases. We also describe an architecture that implements these two fundamental constructs over Internet databases. The aim of the proposed model and architecture is to eventually facilitate data discovery and sharing for Internet databases.