Semantic Integration in Big Data: State-of-the-Art

Abstract

Nowadays, web users and systems continually overload the web with an exponential generation of a massive amount of data. This leads to making big data more important in several domains such as social networks, internet of things, health care, E-commerce, aviation safety, etc. The use of big data has become increasingly crucial for companies due to the significant evolution of information providers and users on the web. However, big data remain meaningless without semantics. In order to get a good comprehension of big data, we raise questions about how big data and semantic are related to each other and how semantic may help. To overcome this problem, researchers devote considerable time to the integration of ontology in big data to ensure reliable interoperability between systems in order to make big data more useful, readable and exploitable. This technology can hide the heterogeneity of different data resources. Moreover, in given domains, users can exchange knowledge without caring to choose the suitable semantic that makes their content more expressive. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview for readers about big data and the appropriate tools to manipulate and analyse them such as Hadoop. Afterwards, we talk about ontology and how it can be used to improve big data management and analyses for decision makers. Finally, different semantic integration approaches are seen in a comparative study. This survey is concluded with a discussion and some perspectives.