Description
Semantic Web (SW) technology aims to facilitate the integration of legacy data sources spread worldwide. Despite the plethora of SW languages (e.g., RDF/S, OWL) recently proposed for supporting large-scale information interoperation, the vast majority of legacy sources still rely on relational databases (RDB) published on the Web or corporate intranets as virtual XML. In this article, we advocate a first-order logic framework for mediating high-level queries to relational and/or XML sources using community ontologies expressed in a SW language such as RDF/S. We describe the architecture and reasoning services of our SW integration middleware, termed SWIM, and we present the main design choices and techniques for supporting powerful mappings between different data models, as well as reformulation and optimization of queries expressed against mediator ontologies and views.