Tenth International Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems (ISMIS); in Ras and Skowron: Artificial Inelligence Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1415, Springer Verlag, pp.441-455, October 1997; Paper (ps).
When combining data from distinct sources, there is a need to share meta-data and other knowledge about various sourcer domains. Due to semantic inconsistencies problems arise when combining knowledge across domains and the knowledge is simply merged. Also, knowledge that is irrelevant to the task of interoperation will be included, making the result unnecessarily complex. An algebra over ontologies has been proposed to support disciplined manipulation of domain knowledge resources. However, if one tries to interoperte directly with the knowledge bases, semantic problems arise due to heterogenuity of representations.
This heterogenuity problem can be eliminated by using an intermediate model that controls the knowledge translation from a source knowledge base. The intermediate model we have developed is based on the concept of abstract knowledge representation and has two components: a modeling behavior which separates the knowledge from its implementation, and a performative behavior which establishes context abstraction rules over the knowledge.