Coordinating context building in heterogeneous information systems

摘要

We present an architecture to coordinate the construction of the context within which meaningful information between heterogeneous information systems can be exchanged. We call this coordinator SCOPES (Semantic Coordinator Over Parallel Exploration Spaces). A classification of semantic conflicts we proposed elsewhere is used to build and refine the context, by discovering the semantic mapping rules (inter-schema correspondence assertions) between corresponding elements of the communicating systems. A truth maintenance system is used to manage the multiple intermediate contexts. It provides a mechanism to infer or retract assertions on the basis of the knowledge acquired during the reconciliation process. This nonmonotonic technique is used in conjunction with the Dempster-Shafer theory of belief functions to model the likelihood of alternative contexts. Finally, we propose an algorithm which illustrates how the various components of the architecture interact with one another in order to build context.