Design, redesign and publication of linked schema repositories in the large

Integrated repositories of conceptual schemas provide organizations dealing with a large amount of data sources with an integrated view on the information they manage. Making schema repositories compliant with the Web and with the Web knowledge technologies has become crucial today. In this paper we present an approach to conceptual metadata management based on the design and the publication of repositories of linked Web schemas organized by abstraction. Schemas and schema mappings are represented in the repositories by means of a SKOS extension defined in the paper. The language makes the schemas reciprocally crosslinked, providing native Web-based browsing and search functionalities. Abstraction-based schema integration primitives provide the building blocks for the organization of the repositories: loose schema mappings are based on abstraction relations and the repository is organized into levels of abstraction; the design of the repository is based on the progressive abstraction and integration of source schemas. The approach is compliant with state-of-the-art tools developed in the semanticWeb, which provide tool support for the design and publication on theWeb of repositories of linked schemas. Copyright 2010 ACM.