Using Information-Flow Theory to Enable Semantic Interoperability

We observe an ever growing need for integration in today’s research agendas across a variety of organisations. The proliferation of ontologies and other similar knowledge-rich and labour-intensive structures as well as their exposure to a distributed environment like the Web, and eventually its successor, the Semantic Web, justifies the need. Although a plethora of solutions have been proposed and used, there are many issues which remain unclear. The most striking one is the antithesis in the availability of solutions for semantic integration as opposed to the abundance of techniques and methods for syntactic integration. In this paper we make the first step towards semantic integration by proposing a mathematically sound application of channel theory to enable semantic interoperability of separate ontologies representing similar domains.