Integração de bancos de dados federados na web usando agentes móveis.

Abstract

The classic problem of information integration has been addressed for a long time. The Semantic Web project is aiming to define an infrastructure that enables machine communication on the web. This is a vision that tackles the problem of semantic heterogeneity by using ontologies for information sharing. Although designed to be used on the entire web, the ideas behind the Semantic Web can be used in a federated database environment, in which the data sources are previously known and there is a global schema, described in an ontology, which enables data integration. In order that the power of the Semantic Web be perceived, software agents that utilize the infrastructure provided by the application of this vision need to be created, so as to improve the integration process. Based on ontologies, software agents will be capable of finding the correct data on the adequate sites of the federation, and achieve the integration process as soon as possible. In this dissertation we present a solution, known as DIA, for semantic integration of a federated database using mobile agents and ontologies.