Scalable interoperability through the use of COIN lightweight ontology
ODBIS'05/06 Proceedings of the First and Second VLDB conference on Ontologies-based databases and information systems
A Context-Based Approach to Reconciling Data Interpretation Conflicts in Web Services Composition
ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT)
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The amount of information has been growing exponentially. How to effectively use this information has become a significant challenge. A post 9/11 study indicated that the deficiency of semantic interoperability technology hindered the ability to integrate information from disparate sources in a meaningful and timely fashion to allow for preventive precautions. Meanwhile, organizations that provided useful services by combining and reusing information from publicly accessible sources have been legally challenged. The Database Directive has been introduced in the European Union and six legislative proposals have been made in the U.S. to provide legal protection for noncopyrightable database contents, but they have differing and sometimes conflicting scope and strength, which creates legal uncertainty for valued-added data reuse practices. The need for clearer data reuse policy will become more acute as the technology improves to make integration much easier. We take an interdisciplinary approach to addressing technology and policy challenges. The technology component builds upon the existing Context Interchange (COIN) framework for semantic interoperability. We focus on temporal semantic heterogeneity where data sources and receivers make time-varying assumptions about data semantics. A collection of time-varying assumptions are called a temporal context. We extend the existing COIN representation formalism to explicitly represent temporal contexts, and the COIN reasoning mechanism to reconcile temporal semantic heterogeneity in the presence of semantic heterogeneity of time. We also perform a systematic evaluation of the COIN approach. Compared with several traditional approaches, the COIN approach has much greater flexibility and scalability. For the policy component, we develop an economic model that formalizes the policy instruments in one of the latest legislative proposals in the U.S. With the model, we identify the circumstances under which legal protection for non-copyrightable content is needed, the different conditions, and the corresponding policy choices. Depending on the cost level of database creation, the degree of differentiation of the reuser database, and the efficiency of policy administration, the optimal policy choice can be protecting a legal monopoly, encouraging competition via compulsory licensing, discouraging voluntary licensing, or even allowing free riding. The results are useful for formulating a socially beneficial database protection policy.