Visual Data Integration based on Description Logic Reasoning

Despite many innovative systems supporting the data integration process, designers advocate more abstract metaphors to master the inherent complexity of this activity. In fact, the visual notations provided in many modern data integration systems might run into scale up problems when facing the integration of big data sources. Thus, higher level visual notations and automatic schema mapping mechanisms might be the key factors to make the data integration process more tractable. In this paper we present the Conceptual Data Integration Language (CoDIL), a visual language providing conceptual level visual mechanisms to manipulate and integrate data sources, together with a formalization of the language icon operators by means of ALCN Description Logic. The formalization allowed us to define the logic-level semantics of CoDIL, providing reasoning rules for validating the correctness of a data integration process and for generating the logic-level reconciled schema.