Software Reconfiguration through Ontology Mapping
Ying Wang · Chinese Journal of Computers · 2001
Software reuse, reconfiguration and interoperability are universal problems in computer science. Reuse and reconfiguration are the persistent aims from Structured Programming, Object Oriented Methodology to current Agent Oriented Programming. Although the emergence of open systems and standardization has enabled operational interoperability, we still have to solve semantic interoperability in order to implement “cooperation” among different information systems. There are many legacy systems based on conflicting ontologies that hinder the communications and become the obstacle of software reuse and system interoperability. By analyzing the relation between software systems and their ontologies, a new software reconfiguration architecture is proposed in this paper. This architecture is based on intelligent agents, which include mediator agents, ontology mapping agents, directory agents, and information agents that are formed by encapsulating legacy systems. This architecture is agile and easy to be re configured because every agent is independent of others. The ontology mapping agent is designed to translate ontologies from dialect ontologies to the mediation ontology or vice versa. As word for word mapping is not applicable in ontology translation, so in this paper a rule based mapping method is introduced to translate sentences among different ontologies. Moreover, since exact translation is not always available, an approximate method is proposed to deliver a limited degree of accuracy. Finally, a semantic interoperability algorithm is proposed by combining the rule based ontology mapping strategy with the reconfiguration architecture and a case study using this method is discussed.