Integrating a heterogeneous distributed data environment with a database specific ontology

The number of databases that are available today continues to grow. Any attempts to search these databases run into the problem that the user's terminology does not match the database terminology. Ontologies have been proposed as a means of bridging this gap. While available ontologies can be expected to be domain specific, they are rarely database specific. The present work makes use of the combination of a domain specific ontology and Summary Schema Model[2] tree fragments to create a database specific ontology. The model of the ontology and search algorithms are given. A prototype to test the feasibility of our approach has been developed and its implementation is briefly overviewed. The prototype uses a database specific ontology to integrate a set of relational databases and create a correct SQL query.