Representing and integrating light-weight semantic web models in the large

Semantic Web model representation and integration can be exploited to provide organizations that deal with a large amount of data sources with an integrated view on the overall information managed. In order to support semantic Web model representation and integration in the large users must be provided with light-weight languages to represent and integrate the models, in particular avoiding the design of complex Tbox axioms. Assuming to adopt at the frontend level graph-based Concept-to-Concept Relationship (CCR) representations, in this paper we question about two semantic issues. First, we inquire whether light-weight semantic Web languages such as RDFS and DL-Lite can be used to provide the semantics of individual CCR models. Second, we inquire whether these languages can be used to provide appropriate semantics for the mappings needed for model integration. Discussing a case study in the eGovernment domain we claim that both the answer are negative. Therefore, we propose a new semantic interpretation for CCR models and we define three main classes of integration and abstraction relations defining their semantics.