Semantic Technologies & Knowledge Management

Semantic Integration could be the next big thing, if it can successfully integrate disparate applications and data sources easier as it promises to. It deals with how the meaning is changed when information is transferred from one application in one context, to another application in a different context. The basic idea behind Semantic Integration is rather simple - a domain ontology will act as a vehicle for integration by leveling out the semantic differences between different contexts. The technique involves building of a domain ontology and mapping various data sources and applications to the domain ontology. This is obviously superior to mappnig every application to every other application which results in n x n mappings. Adding another application is trivial if things are semantically integrated, as now all we need to do is a mapping between the new application and the domain ontology.

The main problem is to come up with a domain ontology that is complete enough and can be mapped to individual application concepts, which is not an easy task. There are other alternative achitectures possible, and some are discussed in this paper. So far, I have not seen any large scale Semantic Integration efforts (except in research), my hope is that Santa will bring us some by next Christmas.

Some References:

• Proceedings of the Semantic Integration Workshop, Florida, 2003.
  
• Proceedings of the ECAI-02 Workshop on Ontologies and Semantic Interoperability, France, 2002.
  
• Semantic Integration: Strategies & Tools. TopQuadrant Technology Briefing, 2003.
  
• Using Ontologies for Data and Semantic Integration, Monica Crubezy, Stanford Medical Informatics, Stanford University, November 2003.
  
• Creating Semantically Integrated Communities on the World Wide Web, Michael Uschold and Michael Gruninger, Semantic Web Workshop, 2002.
  
• Interoperability Standards in the Semantic Web, Steven Ray, NIST, Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering, March 2002.
  
• Semantic Integration Sample from Intellidimension - describes a simple example of how Semantic Integration works.