A Seamless Query Approach to Multiple Databases

Abstract

The maturity of Internet has given rises to many e-commerce sites that users may need to access. Therefore, there is need to provide users with easy and flexible access to information from multiple, dispersed and heterogeneous e-commerce data sources via single point of access. E-commerce sites are continuously emerging, maintained by different organizations and managed independently. The combination of data from different ecommerce sites on the internet usually fails due to syntactic and semantic differences. The access, retrieval and utilization of information from the different e-commerce web portal necessitate the need for easy and seamless access to several databases. Semantic difference technically refers to as semantic heterogeneity is a major issue that needs to be resolve in order to create interoperability among several databases on the internet. Though, there are existing approaches, but they are no longer efficient in the current reality of ubiquitous data on the internet. In this paper, an architecture for unify interface to multiple data sources on the internet is proposed. The paper adopts ontology-based approach using WordNet as a semantic dictionary for the reconciliation of semantic conflicts between the concepts or terms. Experimental evaluation of the proposed approach shows that the synonyms of a queried term are generated as hit from the available databases, which implies the feasibility and effectiveness of the approach.