AERIA: Extending SKOS for the Practical, yet Well-founded, Representation and Integration of Web Schemas in the Large

Multi-layered repositories of schemas can be exploited to provide organizations that deal with a large amount of data sources with an integrated view on the overall information managed. In order to support semantic Web schema representation and integration in the large users must be provided with light-weight languages to represent and integrate the models, in particular avoiding the design of complex Tbox axioms. In this paper we present a language that aims to achieve a good balance between expressivity and ease of use, namely the binary subset of AERIA, and we define its conceptual syntax, its semantics, and its concrete syntax based on a SKOS extension. The SKOS extension we propose allows for representing light-weight Web schemas to support schema integration and abstraction by (i) extending SKOS with the capability to represent arbitrary relationships between concepts, (ii) extending SKOS with relations representing abstraction-based mappings among concepts, namely, interschema generalization, forgetting and collapsing relations. Since the proposed approach is compliant with available tools developed for semantic Web languages, tool support to design multi-layered repositories of Web schemas is provided. The approach is illustrated by means of a case study discussed throughout the paper. © 2011 ACADEMY PUBLISHER.