D13.3v0.3 WSMX Data Mediation

Data heterogeneity problems have been investigated intensely in the last decade, in an attempt to find solutions to data base integration, query rewriting, exchanged business documents transformations, product catalogs management etc. Unfortunately, no complete or general solutions were found for these problems, so data mediation still remains a trade-off between the desired degree of accuracy and the amount of human involvement needed in the process. In this document we investigate data mediation as part of the emerging semantic technologies for Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services. Particularly we try to see how ontologies can be used in this process, and what tool support is required in order to increase the degree of automation provided and to reduce the human user effort. For this we describe the concrete mechanisms both for the design-time phase of the mediation process that lead to a semi-automatic creation of alignments between ontologies and for the runtime phase which applies in an automatic way the alignments derived during design time.