Semantic Association of Taxonomy-based Standards Using Ontology.
Hung-Ju Chu, Randy Chow, Su‐Shing Chen, Raja R. A. Issa, Iván Mutis · 2005
The vision of semantic interoperability, the fluid sharing of digitalized knowledge, has led much research on ontology/schema mapping/aligning. Although this line of research is fundamental and has brought valuable contributions to this endeavor, it does not represent a solution to the challenge, semantic heterogeneity, since the performance of proposed approaches significantly relies on the degree of uniformity, formalization and sufficiency of data representations but most of today’s independently developed information systems seldom have common knowledge modeling frameworks and their data are often not formally and adequately specified. Consequently, a workable solution usually requires interventions of domain experts. In human society, hierarchically structured standards (or taxonomies) for characterizing complex application processes and objects used in the processes are often used as a common and effective way to achieve some semantic agreements among stakeholders within a domain. This research hypothesizes that the establishment and the use of such standards can serve as a framework that can effectively facilitate the reconciliation of semantic heterogeneity in complex application domains. However, the reality shows that a comprehensive priori consensus is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to reach. Consequently, various complementary and competing standards are often created and their constant-changing nature yields another level of challenge in achieving the hypothesis. This paper focuses on the development of methodology for bridging complementary standards within an application domain. It exemplifies such standards in building construction industry where interoperability problems are prevalent and human interactions are commonplace. It proposes a semi-automatic approach for semantically associating the standards to reduce costly human intervention in a workflow. The approach formalizes standards by using ontology and discovers their affinity (to what degree they are related with respect to their usage) from automated project document processing and semi-automatic domain expert inputs. A high-level architecture of an integration framework in web environment is suggested for depicting the role of the semantic association approach in the system.