A scalable framework for the interoperation of information sources
Prasenjit Mitra, Gio C. M. Wiederhold, Stefan Decker · 2001
. Resolving heterogeneity among information systems is a crucial problem if we wish to gain value from the many distributed resources available to us. Problems of heterogeneity in hardware, operating systems, and data structures have been widely addressed, but issues of diverse semantics have been handled mainly in an ad-hoc fashion. In this paper, we present ONION, a system based a scalable approach to interoperation of information systems by articulating their associated ontologies. An articulation focuses on the semantically relevant intersection of information resources with respect to a type of application. However, ontologies obtained from diverse sources are represented using different conceptual models. We have designed a simple intermediate conceptual model - the ONION conceptual model - that we use to transform ontologies into before we generate semantic correspondences or articulations between them. In ONION, application-dependent articulation rules that capture the correspondence between concepts in different ontologies are established between source ontologies semi-automatically. Finally we present an ontology algebra, based on the articulation rules, for the composition of ontologies. 1