Research on Ontology-Based Metadata Model

In many researches, one of major challenges is to archive, access, and analyze various heterogeneous databases containing useful information gathered from a large volume of data. Metadata plays a critical role in database integration, so metadata model is put forward which comprises information of data content. Discussion on information integration solves the problem with manipulating the metadata in term of the semantics. An ontology is an explicit specification of the conceptualization of a domain, which allows various entities represented in different data sources to have the same shared semantic meaning. This paper presents and motivates an extended ontology-based metadata model which represents semantic information about concepts explicitly. The model can be used to solve ambiguities that can arise when applications with heterogeneous databases have to interoperate in order to perform a task.