The Computer Journal 40(5) 1997 Impact of Semantic Heterogeneity on Federating Databases

The difficult problems in design of systems which facilitate interoperation and mediation among information sources and their consumers arise from the presence of semantic heterogeneity among the schemas and ontologies supporting the different services. The purpose of this paper is to develop a taxonomy of semantic heterogeneity, and to describe, taking the perspective of text databases, the conditions under which autonomyrespecting interoperation of different kinds are likely to be feasible. The main conclusion is that interoperation can be based on structured database technology only if the participating organisations communicate among themselves, otherwise the considerations underlying text databases dominate the technology used.