Federated Ontologies Supporting a Merged Worldview for Distributed Systems

Encouraging interoperability among systems is a difficult task, and it becomes more so when the systems each have their own discrete view of entities and processes that are common to all. A proposed method of investigating solutions for these problems is to federate the ontology representations of the existing systems. Federating the ontological representations is to follow the same methodology suggested for building federated databases. With federated databases, each system is represented by a local schema; here it is proposed that each system will be represented by a low-level ontological description of the system. By representing the ontological description in not only a similar representation method, but one where entities, processes, and relationships have their meaning exposed through primitives of meaning, it is hoped that using these primitives as the common atoms, the meaning of such ontological representations can be merged, and eventually federated.