A case study of an ontology-driven dynamic data integration in a telecommunications supply chain

Data Integration refers to the problem of combining data residing at autonomous and heterogeneous sources, and providing users with a unified global view. Ontology-based integration solutions have been advocated but for the case to be made for real deployment of such solutions, the integration effort and performance needs to be characterized. In this paper, we measure the performance of a generalised ontology based integration system using the THALIA integration benchmark. The ontology based integration solution is used to integrate data dynamically across a real telecommunications value chain. An extension of the THALIA benchmark, to take account of the integration effort required, is introduced. We identify the issues impacting the ontology based integration approach and propose further experiments.