The construction
of an integrated view is complicated because organizations store different
types of data, in varying formats, with different meanings, and reference them using
different names (Lawrence & Barker, 2001).
To allow the seamless integration of HAD tourism data sources rely on the use of
semantics. Semantic integration requires knowledge of the meaning of data within the
tourism data sources, including integrity rules and the relationships across sources.
Semantic technologies are designed to extend the capabilities of data sources allowing
to unbind the representation of data and the data itself and to give context
to data. The integration of tourism data sources requires thinking not of the data
itself but rather the structure of those data: schemas, data types, relational database
constructs, file formats, and so forth. Figure 5 illustrates the component in layer 3
of our architecture which carries out the mappings between different data models.
This layer can be seen as a middleware level that implements the interfaces to the
data sources to be integrated.
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