Semantic Information Integration Inside and Across Organizational Boundaries
Jos de Bruijn · 2003
Abstract.Information integration within enterprises is hindered by differences in software and hardware platforms and by syntactic and semantic differences in the schemas of the various heterogeneous data sources. This is a well-known problem in the area of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), where many applications have been developed for the purpose of information integration. Most current tools, however, only address the problems of (soft- and hardware) platform and syntactic heterogeneity. The problem of semantic heterogeneity (i.e. the differences in meaning of concepts) is, in current solutions, reduced to syntactic rewriting without explicating the meaning of the data. When broadening the scope of the information integration problem to cross organizational border, the problem becomes even more severe, because within an organization there is a certain amount of control over the applications, while there typically is no control over the applications used by other organizations or even organizational units. Standards are arising to mitigate these problems of inter-operability between organizations, but current approaches are very specific for certain branches and are typically very rigid in what they require from anyone using the standard. We investigate these problems of semantic information integration and their solutions using