A visual tool for ontology alignment to enable geospatial interoperability

In distributed geospatial applications with heterogeneous databases, an ontology-driven approach to data integration relies on the alignment of the concepts of a global ontology that describe the domain, with the concepts of the ontologies that describe the data in the distributed databases. Once the alignment between the global ontology and each distributed ontology is established, agreements that encode a variety of mappings between concepts are derived. In this way, users can potentially query hundreds of geospatial databases using a single query. Using our approach, querying can be easily extended to new data sources and, therefore, to new regions. In this paper, we describe the AgreementMaker, a tool that displays the ontologies, supports several mapping layers visually, presents automatically generated mappings, and finally produces the agreements. r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.