In this article, we present a semantic-based approach for dealing with the interoperability issue in the conservation-restoration domain. We first evaluate the context and our observations confirm the critical need for a data integration system taking advantage of data semantics. Our solution consists in: (1) building a domain-specific ontology, to rely on a unified understanding of the conservation-restoration data; (2) mapping the shared ontology to each data source, allowing each participating source to manage its own semantic database, consisting of its original data now associated to the semantic level; and (3) integrating all sources’ data, for querying them in the same homogeneous way. The presented achievements have been conducted as part of the PARCOURS project, whose aim is to develop an information system able to provide a unified access to distinct information sources, related to the cultural heritage field in general and the conservation-restoration processes in particular.

We present the whole querying process of our ontologybased data integration proposal, that we call Semantic Mediator. The global schema (a TBox) is composed of the source schemas (also Tboxes) and a taxonomy, which links the sources to each other. The querying process is based on the global-schema's structure and consists of three steps: global query rewriting, source querying and global answer building. We describe the overall distributed system and the query-rewriting algorithm. Then we present an application of such a semantic mediation, the Personae project, which is for enabling historians to share their prosopographic data from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

International audienc