Infrastructure for Semantic Interoperability and Integration: Breakout Discussion Summary

Over the course of the week, one of the questions that came up repeatedly was: “what kind of infrastructure would be needed to support semantic interoperability and integration of systems”? It was widely assumed that semantics would be used for enabling translation and improving interoperability. However, it was not well understood how semantics or semantic mappings were to be shared. The emerging notion of a Semantic Web built on the World Wide Web infrastructure has spurred renewed interest in the possibility of semantic interoperability. However, much remains to be done to clearly articulate what the vision of ‘semantic interoperability’ is exactly, and many fundamental issues need to be addressed before we will see some broad-based theoretical and practical results that will make the vision become a reality. These questions range from the pragmatics of how definitions and mappings are published, shared and found to more fundamental concerns about what level of description the shared semantics needs to address.