Description

The collaboration with this group was mainly in the area of architectures for federated information systems inside the BLOOM project. We tried to solve the growing need of cooperation between independent entities that requires an integrated access to autonomous, heterogeneous and distributed databases. This integrated access, that is, an access as if they were a single database, requires interconnecting the database systems by communication network and overlapping a software layer upon the DBMSs to support their communication, sharing their data but preserving their autonomy at the local application level. The collection of cooperating DBMS (also known as Component Databases - CDBs) forms a Database Federation (DBF) and the Federated Database Management System (FDBMS) is the software that manages the DBF.

Later on, we also collaborated in semantic data integration, ontological knowledge and reasoning. Specifically, we proposed an approach based on ontologies and differentiated universes of discourse (UoD), where users interact with the system and, from this interaction, integration rules are derived. These rules were based on Description Logic ontological relations for subsumption and equivalence, that relate the different UoD and produce a shared conceptualisation. It was applied in a newspaper information domain.

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