Semantic Integration : Position Statement

Much of the research in semantic integration has reduced the problem to ontology integration – two software applications can be integrated by specifying the semantic mappings between their respective ontologies. However, few applications in practice have explicitly specified ontologies, and even when they do, the ontologies are not fully axiomatized (that is, there exist intended interpretations that are not models of the axioms or there exist unintended models of the axioms). Consequently, ontology mappings are not sufficient to achieve semantic integration. To address this problem, we adopt what we call the Ontological Stance – we model a software application as if it were an inference system with an axiomatized ontology, and use this ontology to predict the set of sentences that the inference system decides to be satisfiable. This is analogous to the intentional stance, which is the strategy of interpreting the behavior of an entity by treating it as if it were a rational agent who performs activities in accordance with some set of intentional constraints. In our work, we focus on techniques for achieving the semantic integration of software applications directly by using ontologies as interlingua between the applications themselves. The distinguishing feature of this Interlingua architecture is the existence of a mediating ontology that is independent of the software applications’ ontologies and which is used as a neutral interchange ontology. The semantic mappings between application and interlingua ontologies are manually generated and verified prior to interaction time. This process of creating the mapping between the application ontology and the interlingua ontology is identical to the process of creating a mapping directly between two application ontologies. However, it has two advantages. First, we only need to specify one mapping for each application ontology, rather than specifying a mapping for each pair of application ontologies. Second, if the application ontologies and the interlingua ontology are specified using the same logical language, then the translation can be