Building a virtual view of heterogeneous data source views

In order to make possible the analysis of data stored in heterogeneous data sources, it could be necessary a preliminary building of an aggregated view of these sources, also referred as virtual view. The problem is that the data sources can use different technologies and represent the same information in different ways. The use of a virtual view allows the unified access to heterogeneous data sources without knowing details regarding each single source. This paper proposes an approach for creating a virtual view of the views of the heterogeneous data sources. The approach provides features for the automatic schema matching and schema merging. It exploits both syntax-based and semantic-based techniques for performing the matching; it also considers both semantic and contextual features of the concepts. The usefulness of the approach is validated through a case study.