Reusing ontology mappings for query routing in semantic peer-to-peer environment

To efficiently support automated interoperability between ontology-based information systems in distributed environments, the semantic heterogeneity problem has to be dealt with. To do so, traditional approaches have acquired and employed explicit mappings between the corresponding ontologies. Usually these mappings can be only obtained from human domain experts. However, it is too expensive and time-consuming to collect all possible mapping results on distributed information systems. More seriously, as the number of systems in a large-scale peer-to-peer (P2P) network increases, the efficiency of the ontology mapping is exponentially decreased. Thereby, in this paper, we propose a novel semantic P2P system, which is capable of (i) sharing and exchanging existing mappings among peers, and (ii) composing shared mappings to build a certain path between two systems. Given two arbitrary peers (i.e., source and destination), the proposed system can provide indirect ontology mappings to make them interoperable. In particular, we have focused on query-based communication for evaluating the proposed ontology mapping composition system. Once direct ontology mappings are collected from candidate peers, a given query can be (i) segmented into a set of sub-queries, and (ii) transformed to another query. With respect to the precision performance, our experimentation has shown an improvement of about 42.5% compared to the keyword-based query searching method. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.