Using an inference mechanism for helping the data integration

Sharing and integrating information across multiple autonomous and heterogeneous data sources has emerged as a strategic requirement in modern business. We deal with this problem by proposing a declarative approach based on the creation of a reference model and perspective schemata. The former serves as a common semantic meta-model, while the latter defines correspondence between schemata. Furthermore, using the proposed architecture, we developed an inference mechanism which allows the (semi-) automatic derivation of new mappings between schemata from previous ones. The aim of this paper is to present the proposed inference mechanism.