A translation engine in support of context-level interoperability

• Authors: Kym J. Pohl
• Venue: Intelligent Decision Technologies - Ontology Driven Interoperability for Agile Applications using Information Systems: Requirements and Applications for Agent Mediated Decision Support
• Year: 2008

The need to support context-level interoperability is increasingly gaining importance in today's arena of semantic-oriented, decision-support systems. Unlike data-oriented exchange, such semantic interoperability must venture beyond the elementary communication of discrete data values and endeavor to translate between significantly more expressive, context-rich representations. Further, support of this level of interoperability must not require contamination of native perspective embedded within each participant's representation. The solution offered in this paper presents a service-oriented framework supporting an extensible set of translation paradigms to effectively connect expressive, ontology-based environments. Fundamental to this solution is the notion of a remote service request. Employing this metaphor as the basis for participant interaction allows each system within a universe of potentially diverse representations to interoperate as collections of invocatible services. Further, by transparently marshalling such requests between client and service representations, such translation engine offers each member of this multi-lingual reality the means to interoperate within the familiar confines of their native representations. Finally, the discussion concludes with an evaluation of this capability in terms of the Levels of Conceptual Interoperability Model LCIM for assessing degrees of interoperability.