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Contextual alignment of ontologies in the eCOIN semantic interoperability framework

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Abstract

The prospect of combining information from diverse sources for superior decision making is plagued by the challenge of semantic heterogeneity, as data sources often adopt different conventions and interpretations when there is no coordination. An emerging solution in information integration is to develop an ontology as a standard data model for a domain of interest, and then to define the correspondences between the data sources and this common model to eliminate their semantic heterogeneity and produce a single integrated view of the data sources. We first claim that this single integrated view approach is unnecessarily restrictive, and instead offer the view that ontologies can simultaneously accommodate multiple integrated views provided the accompaniment of contexts, a set of axioms on the interpretation of data allowing local variations in representation and nuances in meaning, and a conversion function network between contexts to reconcile contextual differences. Then, we illustrate how to achieve semantic interoperability between multiple ontology-based applications. During this process, application ontologies are aligned through the reconciliation of their context models, and a new application with a virtual merged ontology is created. We illustrate this alternative approach with the alignment of air travel and car rental domains, an actual example from our prototype implementation.

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Notes

  1. There are typically two types of “users”: A “developer” user that writes the actual software that issues SQL requests to the databases and provides a “user friendly” interface (usually via a web browser) so that “end” users can make their requests using simple pull-down menus and other such means. In both cases, these users need not know the actual semantics of the sources. Although the examples in this paper show the use of SQL, the key issue of mapping source contexts to receiver contents applies to both types of users.

  2. Similarly, the contexts of the two sources are shown in the center of Fig. 2.

  3. The abbreviations, such as I and A, correspond to the attributes shown in Fig. 2.

  4. Notation: We add a single quote ‘ to semantic objects/relations to distinguish them from primitive ones.

  5. Underscores, as in Prolog, are used to designate any value.

  6. For simplicity reasons we are going to take n = 2 in the rest of the discussion.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

    Aykut Firat

  2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Stuart Madnick & Benjamin Grosof

Authors
  1. Aykut Firat
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  2. Stuart Madnick
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  3. Benjamin Grosof
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Correspondence to Aykut Firat.

Additional information

Editor-in-Chief’s Note: An earlier version of this paper was accepted for WITS2004. The authors were subsequently invited to submit an expanded paper for publication consideration in Information Technology and Management. The conference co-chairs, Professors Amit Dutta and Paulo Goes were the guest editors for this paper.

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Firat, A., Madnick, S. & Grosof, B. Contextual alignment of ontologies in the eCOIN semantic interoperability framework. Inf Technol Manage 8, 47–63 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10799-006-0007-1

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