Knowledge Integration to Overcome Ontological Heterogeneity: Challenges from Financial Information Systems

The shift towards global networking brings with it many opportunities and challenges. In this paper, we discuss key technologies in achieving global semantic interoperability among heterogeneous information systems, including both traditional and web data sources. In particular, we focus on the importance of this capability and technologies we have designed to overcome ontological heterogeneity, a common type of disparity in financial information systems. Our approach to representing and reasoning with ontological heterogeneities in data sources is an extension of the Context Interchange (COIN) framework, a mediator-based approach for achieving semantic interoperability among heterogeneous sources and receivers. We also analyze the issue of ontological heterogeneity in the context of source-selection, and offer a declarative solution that combines symbolic solvers and mixed integer programming techniques in a constraint logic-programming framework. Finally, we discuss how these techniques can be coupled with emerging Semantic Web related technologies and standards such as Web-Services, DAML+OIL, and RuleML, to offer scalable solutions for global semantic interoperability. We believe that the synergy of database integration and Semantic Web research can make significant contributions to the financial knowledge integration problem, which has implications in financial services, and many other e-business tasks.