In case of a large network of autonomous and heterogeneous databases as those potentially accessible from the Web, a meaningful organization and segmentation of databases would have to be based on simple ontologies that describe coherent slices of the information space. These distributed ontologies would filter interactions, accelerate information searches, and allow for the sharing of data in a tractable manner. We propose the use of distributed ontologies of information repositories that get established through a distributed domain ontologies. This meta-information would represent the domain of interest of the underlying information repositories. For example, collections of databases that store information about the same topic are grouped together.
Individual databases join and leave the formed ontologies at their own discretion.
We propose to investigate the design and implementation of distributed ontologies in the context of Web-accessible databases. Middleware support will be investigated. Database administrators and users will use one single query language to transparently manage data and meta-data . This is of great importance as a major bottleneck in managing government data has been the wide variety of interfaces users and case officers had to be exposed to, to get and provide services. Users of the proposed system will be able to discover and integrate data drawn from dissimilar databases using one single interface and remain unaware of the heterogeneity and autonomy aspects of the underlying databases.