Cases on semantic interoperability

Interoperability. This is concerned with finding solutions to the problem of heterogeneity. As information systems become more distributed and open to serve the needs of an ever increasing distributed IT environment, heterogeneity, which is naturally inherited in independently constructed information systems, comes across as an obstacle. The crux of the problem with heterogeneity is that it impedes productivity as it makes integration of information systems difficult. Heterogeneity occurs in many levels in an information system; however, the most important source of heterogeneity is in the conception, modelling and structuring of information. There are cultural, regional, and organisational variations of the same piece of information. This result in heterogeneity: it is common to encounter different forms of information regarding the same entity of interest across different information systems. To overcome this burden, interoperability solutions have been proposed and used extensively in the past three decades. From the early days of Electronic Data Interchange to XML solutions in recent times, interoperability solutions aim to glue together heterogeneous information data sets and increase productivity. Despite the plethora of interoperability solutions though, we observe that most are focussed on one aspect of heterogeneity: syntax. That is, they tackle syntactic variations in the representation of information. But, there is a need to preserve the meaning of entities used in everyday transactions that involve information sharing. In order for these transactions to be successful we need to be able to uncover and expose the semantics of the elements taking part in these transactions. That goes beyond detection of simple syntactic variations and tackles the issue of information entities expressed in syntactically similar manner but have a different meaning. Solutions that take into account the meaning of information entities are often characterised as semantic integration or semantic interoperability. Semantic interoperability and integration is concerned with the use of explicit semantic descriptions to facilitate information and systems integration. Semantic technologies, primarily ontologies and the use of Semantic Web, provide the means to attach meaning to conventional concepts. That makes it possible to automatically process and integrate large amounts of information without human intervention. This special issue presents a selection of 5 papers that discuss a variety of semantic interoperability solutions. Their broad scope of applications and domain specific benefits highlight the intricate nature of semantic interoperability work. A more comprehensive and elaborate review of the subject is presented in the Cases on Semantic Interoperability for Information Systems Integration: Practices and Applications book, edited by Cases on semantic interoperability