The increasing demand for accessing heterogeneous information sources to support global applications and decision-making requirements forces organizations to solve heterogeneity problems. One of the important problems stemming from accessing the heterogeneous data is semantic heterogeneity. A number of research efforts have been proposed to address this problem, ranging from mediator-based systems, description logic-based systems to content-descriptive metadata systems. In this paper, we propose a metadata dictionary as an assistant mechanism for solving semantic heterogeneity. The proposed metadata dictionary is designed based on domain ontology where the constituent components are defined in terms of object-oriented and set theory. An XML-based data model is employed to manipulate and express the metadata dictionary contents. The inherent flexibility of XML technology permits systemwide interoperability suitable for a web-based environment.
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