Semantically meaningful data exchange in loosely coupled environments
Christof Bornhövd, Alejandro Buchmann · 2000
When the Internet is used as a global infrastructure for data exchange between autonomous participants, the question of what a data object really means becomes crucial. Unfortunately, many of the underlying assumptions about the meaning of a given data object are given only implicitly. Thus, for a semantically meaningful data exchange, we need to make these assumptions explicit by providing semantic metadata. To be of any use this metadata has to be based on commonly agreed upon vocabularies. In this paper we present a framework for a meaningful data exchange between previously unknown participants, and the integration of data from different providers. It is based on the use of shared vocabularies, or ontologies, as a common interpretation basis for data and metadata. We present a fairly simple representation for these vocabularies which uses Java as a description language.