Ontological View-Driven Semantic Integration in Collaborative Networks

In collaborative enterprise networks, semantic heterogeneity is an important factor that hinders collaboration of various information systems. Ontology-driven semantic integration is an important category of solutions for the semantic integration problem. However, in many domains, there are no explicit and formal ontologies available. This paper proposes to adopt ontological views to address such challenges. It investigates the theoretical foundation of ontologies and ontological views. It presents a framework as a solution, based on the theoretical foundation, including the architecture of a semantic integration enabled environment, the modeling and representation of ontological views, and the semantic equivalence relationship discovered from the ontological views.