Adding Semantic Web Technology to the Object-Oriented Method for Interoperability

摘要

Computer communications advances, functional similarities in related systems, and enhanced information description mechanisms have led to the widespread interconnection of existing systems to meet current and future system requirements in such diverse fields as healthcare, e-commerce, and military applications. Full realization of the potential offered by such interconnections can only be achieved if systems are fully interoperable. Interoperability among independently developed heterogeneous systems is difficult to achieve: systems often have different architectures, hardware platforms, operating systems, host languages and data models. The Object-Oriented Method for Interoperability (OOMI) introduced by Young offers the capability for resolving modeling differences among heterogeneous systems, thereby enabling system interoperation. The OOMI resolves modeling differences by first identifying corresponding entities among systems using semantic and syntactic correlation approaches involving keyword search and neural network techniques. This paper describes how Semantic Web technologies can be used to improve the accuracy of the OOMI correlation methodology by adding Web Ontology Language (OWL) and reasoning capabilities to the OOMI model.