Mediating Knowledge between Application Components

In such contexts as the Semantic Web, the components of an application increasingly rely on ontological models and content knowledge developed and maintained by independent contributors. These components also are designed to be building blocks of various applications. We advocate the use of a mediating component that defines and processes the knowledge transformations required to enable application components to exchange, and inter-operate on, knowledge and data. We present our approach and associated tools to support developers (1) in defining mapping relations between the ontologies involved in their application and (2) in running a mapping interpreter to mediate content knowledge and data among the corresponding ontology-based components. 1 Interoperation of Application