FOWLA, A Federated Architecture for Ontologies

The progress of information and communication technologies has greatly increased the quantity of data to process. Thus, managing data heterogeneity is a problem nowadays. In the 1980s, the concept of a Federated Database Architecture (FDBA) was introduced as a collection of components to unite loosely coupled federation. Semantic web technologies mitigate the data heterogeneity problem, however due to the data structure heterogeneity the integration of several ontologies is still a complex task. For tackling this problem, we propose a loosely coupled federated ontology architecture (FOWLA). Our approach allows the coexistence of various ontologies sharing common data dynamically at query execution through logical rules. We have illustrated the advantages of adopting our approach through several examples and benchmarks. We also compare our approach with other existing initiatives.