Formal Contextual Ontologies for Intelligent Information Systems

due to the extensive research in the emerging field of ontologies. Ontologies Driven Information Systems (ODIS) were introduced by N. Guarino in 1998 [Gua98], and recently is finding rather a great attention from numerous, diversified fields such as Web-based information systems, information integration, and the Semantic Web. This paper introduces the notion of contextual ontologies which it can be very promising to deal with the prominent problem namely semantics heterogeneity for information systems. We focus, however, on formal approach based on ontology to deal with the multi-representation problem where the same concept can be used by several information systems. In fact, we present in this paper a snapshot of thesis research work in contextual ontologies. I. INTRODUCTION ODAY, ontologies are widely used in many scientific and commercial disciplines. They have become the backbone for many applications in areas such as: AI, Computer Science, e-commerce, intelligent integration information, database design and integration, and in new emerging fields namely the Semantic Web and pervasive computing. Recently, it was proposed by the computer scientists to assist in designing and developing information systems [6]. Ontologies play a crucial role in today's information systems in two aspects: the development time and run-time. At development time, it serves as: (i) means of declarative knowledge that will allow knowledge reuse instead of software reuse [5], (ii) a repository of shared common vocabulary that enables the developer to reuse and share application domain knowledge. At the run-time, software agents need access to ontologies to communicate with one another. An agent wants to understand the meaning of terms used by other agents. Our focus in this paper will be on the role that context-dependent (contextual) ontologies play when developing intelligent information systems.