Abstract
This chapter presents an application in the field of food safety using an ontology-based data integration approach. An ontology is a vocabulary used to express the knowledge in a given domain of application. In this chapter, the ontology-based data integration approach permits to homogenize data sources which are heterogeneous in terms of structure and vocabulary. This approach is done in the framework of theSemantic Web, an international initiative which proposes annotating data sources using ontologies in order to manage them more efficiently. In this chapter, the authors explore three ways to integrate data according to a domain ontology: (1) a semantic annotation process to extend local data with Web data which have been semantically annotated according to a domain ontology, (2) a flexible querying system to query uniformly both local data and Web data and (3) an ontology alignment process to find correspondences between data from two sources indexed by distinct ontologies.