E-Business Interoperability Through Ontology Semantic Mapping

With the advent of Semantic Web, knowledge-based interoperability in VE faces a new technological shift, in which ontologies and semantic web technologies plays a major role. Exploiting the explicit semantic description of the domain of discourse allows reasoning and automatically acquiring semantic relations between two different domains of discourses. Such semantic relations would be further applied in converting data between such domains. This process is named Ontology Mapping. The MAFRA–Mapping FRAmework cover all the phases of the process, including analysis, specification, representation, execution and evolution. The execution strategy and methodology are the focus of this paper. The MAFRA Toolkit is being applied in the European project Harmonise, which aims to provide solutions for (semi-) automatic interoperability between major operators in e-tourism.