Towards Semantic Interoperability between Information Systems

RICO, MARIELA; CALIUSCO, MARÍA LAURA; GALLI, MARÍA ROSA; CHIOTTI, OMAR

Applied Semantic Technologies: Using Semantics in Intelligent Information Processing

Taylor & Francis

Lugar: Boca Raton; Año: 2011; p. 65 - 88

The real entities can have features whose representation in an ontology is implicit; and although they may be inferred by a human agent, they cannot be inferred by a machine agent. Moreover, some of these features, called contextual features, have an interpretation that depends on the context in which the entity is considered. These features are not required to be made explicit when the entities are considered within the same context, but it becomes necessary when the entities have to be interpreted in another one. The main contribution of this chapter is a method for enriching the representation of entity semantics in an ontology by making contextual features explicit with the aim of improving the matching between heterogeneous ontologies.Particularly in the last years, P2P information sharing has gained the attention of many researchers since it is the base for enabling inter-enterprise integration by maintaining enterprise autonomy and privacy. In this case, ontology-matching is used to establish an exchange of meaningful information between peers. Enterprises participating in information sharing usually belong to dierent contexts; and since the eectiveness of these applications depends on the accuracy of the matching process, they require more explicit conceptual models. Then, this chapter is focused on a case study based on a P2P information sharing scenario, where each peer belongs to a dierent context.