Service oriented semi-automatic ontology mappting

Instead of the data or information-based interoperability occurring nowadays, many application domains will profit from and strongly require knowledge-based interoperability. In Virtual Enterprises (VE) domain, for example, knowledge-based interoperability is of major importance due to the limitations of data integration supporting the dynamic and ill-specified interconnection of entities. In fact, data or information-based integration lacks important features required in VE, like flexibility, interoperability and automatic configuration of interactions between agents engaged in a specific business activity. Semantic Web, the next WWW trend, suggests the annotation of Web resources with machine-processable metadata, which can provide tools to analyse meaning and semantic relations between documents and their parts. Ontologies as means for conceptualizing and structuring knowledge are seen as the key to the realization of the Semantic Web vision. Ontology allows the explicit specification of a domain of discourse, which permitting the access to and reasoning about an agent knowledge. Semantic Web and ontologies are therefore fully geared as a valuable framework for distinct applications, namely business applications like E-Commerce, B2B and Virtual Enterprises. However, it is hardly conceivable that a single ontology is applied for all domains and interactions, which raises new interoperability problems. Ontology Mapping intends to solve this problem by defining semantic relations