Ontological View Based Semantic Transformation for Distributed Systems

This paper presents a novel ontological view-based semantic transformation method to address the semantic heterogeneity design issue of open distributed information systems. After carefully reviewing the traditional ontology definitions, this work extends the ontological view concept to represent the partial knowledge about the same business domain in an open environment where common ontology does not exist or is not explicitly represented. Solutions in mathematical formulation and corresponding application algorithms, based on the definition of an ontological view, are proposed. By dealing with structural constant and predicate heterogeneity, respectively, the solution enables the ontological views to be transformed, one to another, automatically.