Semantic Web Programming

Chapter 10. Aligning Information

"The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it."

—Edward R. Murrow

In the preceding chapters, you have learned about theoretical and practical knowledge modeling with RDF and OWL, inference and reasoners, Jena, triple stores, SPARQL, and SWRL. This chapter combines all of these threads to describe the task of information integration and explains the role that such integration plays in Semantic Web applications using the FriendTracker application. Specifically, in this chapter, you will:

• Learn about data source ontologies, domain ontologies, application ontologies, and the role they play in Semantic Web applications

• Learn about the FriendTracker application and get an introduction to data-oriented software design

• Learn about ontology alignment and how that process leads to truly integrated information

• See several concrete examples of different practical techniques for ontology alignment in the context of the FriendTracker application

Data Source, Domain, and Application Ontologies

In Chapter 9, "Combining Information," you learned how to transform data from a variety of sources into RDF data for the Semantic Web. Even after all of the data is represented in RDF, however, it is still not integrated in a meaningful sense because the information from each source is expressed in a vocabulary specific ...