An ontological and semantical approach to source-receiver interoperability

Given the current explosion of information resources available to decision makers, achieving semantic interoperability between a data source (e.g., a database) and a data receiver (e.g., a decision maker) is more critical than ever. As decision makers interact with unfamiliar sources that have been independently created and maintained, they need to expend non-trivial cognitive effort to understand the meaning of the information contained within these sources. To address this problem, an architecture called the Context Interchange Architecture is proposed. The central component in this architecture is the context mediator, an intelligent agent which facilitates source-receiver interoperability by enabling the receiver to issue queries and to be presented with answers in a manner that is consistent with the receiver's preferences, goals and knowledge. As a result, a convenient and consistent interface is presented to the receiver, reducing the cognitive effort required for the interaction. In this paper, the theoretical foundation for this architecture, based on the philosophical disciplines of Ontology and Semantics, is presented. A key result of this paper is the formal definition of the external behavior of the context mediator. Such a formal characterization provides a basis for the subsequent design of the knowledge representation and reasoning processes internal to the mediator.