Context Representation in Domain Ontologies and Its Use for Semantic Integration of Data

The goal of this paper is to identify various aspects of context-awareness needed to facilitate semantics integration of data, and to discuss how this knowledge may be represented within ontologies. We first present a taxonomy of ontologies and we show how various kinds of ontologies may cooperate. Then, we compare ontologies and conceptual models. We claim that their main difference is the consensual nature of ontologies when conceptual models are specifically designed for one particular target system. Reaching consensus, in turn, needs specific models of which context dependency has been represented and minimized. We identify five principles for making ontologies less contextual than models and suitable for data integration and we show, as an example, how these principles have been implemented in the PLIB ontology model developed for industrial data integration. Finally, we suggest a road map for switching from conventional databases to ontology-based databases without waiting until standard ontologies are available in every domains.

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