Semantic Gossiping: Coping with Heterogeneous Semantic Knowledge Management Systems in the Large

With the creation and wide adoption of Semantic Web standards like RDF or OWL, a new breed of semantic networks is about to appear. For the first time, we can expect large numbers of knowledge management systems to interoperate using common languages to express the semantics of the data they share or seek. We however foresee semantic heterogeneity to surface once more as a key problem in information integration, given the scale and variety of the systems we are dealing with: Indeed, we realistically cannot expect common global upper-ontologies to capture with sufficient adequacy the requirements of all the different parties in our heterogeneous environment. Custom ontologies will be developed for various application needs, thus endangering global semantic interoperability by introducing local concepts and properties. Also, the situation is somewhat complicated by the fact that ontologies will not be static in such environments, but will tend to evolve, appear or disappear dynamically as systems join and leave the network.