Ontology Abstraction

For Ontologies to serve as a mechanism for reconciling diverse systems and as an integration engine, they must be flexible and separable from the rules (and the systems applying those rules) that would define the nature of the interactions. This is what is referred to as "Ontology Abstraction."

Ontologies are also separate and abstracted from meta-data. One reason that most data standardization efforts have either failed or seriously underperformed is the idea that anyone can fully define the nature of all enterprise data and predict how that will evolve over time - it always has been and will remain wholly unrealistic.

What we need instead are less painful ways to capture and characterize the changing nature of our enterprise data environment. Using Ontologies for this will allow us to manage data in human readable formats that can readily be shared with end users as well as functional experts. Those groups will define Ontologies based upon generic long term expectations (formal sets), dynamic evolution and discovery (dynamic sets) and the business logic logic needed to manage both (interaction rules).



One of the key concepts underpinning Semantic Integration is Ontology Abstraction

Copyright 2008, Semantech Inc.