Title: ISENS: System for Information Integration, Querying, and Exploration, of Multi-Ontology, Distributed, Semantic Web Data

Speaker: Dimitri Dimitrov of Tech-X Corporation

Date/Time: Wednesday, March 11, 2009, 1:30 – 2:30 pm

Location: CSRI Building/Room 90 (Sandia NM)

Brief Abstract: Semantic Web technologies (ontology and query languages, logical reasoners, etc.) are emerging as a promising mechanism to formally define semantics of data that can be shared and processed by computer programs. Since Semantic Web data sources are developed and evolved independently, they typically use different ontologies to represent their data. However, separate data sources on related domains of knowledge generally contain different but complementary information. Thus, there are queries that can only be answered with pieces of information from some of the separate sources. It is of considerable interest to enable query answering based on searching for information in an integrated collection of sources. The multi-ontology representation of different data sets makes it difficult to search the sources in an integrated way. To address this problem, we have developed the ISENS end-to-end information integration system that is based on specific Semantic Web technologies, an algorithm for efficient source selection, and an easy-to-use Web-based user interface. ISENS provides ontology visualization, query construction, and answering by searching and integrating information from distributed, multi-ontology data sources. We describe the system architecture, how information integration and multi-ontology data are handled, the user interface, and the performance of the system on query answering over real-world and synthetic data sets.

CSRI POC: Danny Rintoul, (505) 844-9592