Coordinating Heterogeneous Information Services based on Approximate Ontology Translation

This paper proposes an approximate ontology translation framework for coordinating heterogeneous information services such as regional information services. To achieve semantic interoperability in heterogeneous information services, ontologies have been widely used. Translation of multiple ontologies is necessary for a domain with cross-cultural aspects, such as regional information services. Ontology translation requires approximation mechanisms since it is often the case that no exactly corresponding ontologies exist. However, most previous research efforts on ontology translation do not provide clear semantics for approximation. We therefore propose an approximate ontology translation framework which enables users to describe ontology mapping in an ontology description language. In this framework, users’ queries are reformulated based on an ontology mapping specification using approximate reformulation operators with clear semantics. This framework has been incorporated into an agent system which coordinates regional information services. The prototype achieves semantic interoperability by adopting the approximate ontology translation framework as well as a standardized agent communication language.