a framework to specify, extract and manage topic maps driven by ontology
The ability to extract and merge data that from documents (or databases) of different types, in order to acquire knowledge from a vast repository of information, is of unquestionable value. However that desirable integration is not an easy task. Different approaches can be followed to achieve it, ranging from the merge of resources (implying their conversion to a common format) till the fusion of the extracted parts. The idea is to interoperate those resources keeping them independent, without changes or transformations, creating over them an integration layer that gives us a general overview, as the information slices were gathered. This is possible creating a semantic network, or a conceptual map, over the resources, which relates data items among them mapping each one to its different occurrences in the repository; formally speaking, that conceptual map corresponds to the ontology that describes the knowledge we want to acquire. In this paper, we introduce Metamorphosis, a Topic Maps oriented environment to extract data from heterogeneous information repositories and to generate a browser and conceptual navigator for the extracted knowledge.
topic maps ontologies interoperability information systems semantic web