Approach to Formalizing Ontology Driven Semantic Integration

The ontology approach has been accepted as a very promising approach to semantic integration today. However, because of the diversity of focuses and its various connections to other research domains, the core concepts, theoretical and technical approaches, and research areas of this domain still remain unclear. Such ambiguity makes it difficult to develop a complete framework to evaluate and improve various ontology tools and systems developed for the purpose of semantic integration, and may also limit future in-depth study and system development due to the lack of a comprehensive review of present work and unsolved problems. This research reviewed the past research on semantic integration from the ontology driven perspective, and formalized its related concepts and elements into a framework with four major dimensions. By utilizing such a framework, this research identifies various necessary tasks for each dimension, therefore clarifying the major components for the ontology driven semantic integration, and such an approach could be a cornerstone for building an ontology of ontology integration research in the near future.