Data Modeling and Harmonization with OWL: Opportunities and Lessons Learned
John L. Mccarthy, Denise Warzel, Elisa F. Kendall, Bruce Bargmeyer, Harold R. Solbrig, Kevin D. Keck, Fred Gey · 2015
Abstract. Experience from recent projects helps illuminate the promises and limitations of OWL to specify, review, refine, harmon-ize and integrate diverse data and concept models. One of the attrac-tive features of OWL is that it can be used by inference engines to help augment queries through inferred semantic relationships. But OWL, like SQL, is only a computer programming language. Using it to review and refine representations of data, metadata, and concept systems, including terminologies, thesauri, and ontologies, requires a well-defined abstraction layer which itself can be specified in terms of OWL. In order to optimize, harmonize and integrate such information effectively for large scale projects, OWL definitions and relationships should be specified in terms of a standard metamodel, such as ISO/IEC 11179-3, Edition 3.