A METHOD OF MAPPING SEMANTIC CONTEXT TO ENABLE INTEROPERABILITY AMONG DISPARATE SOURCES

摘要

A distributed collection of applications and repositories with dissimilar syntactic and semantic characteristics may be accessed as though they are a single entity. Queries are performed transparently, without requiring the user to understand or be aware of the characteristics of any individual source. This is performed through the use of a common vocabulary and semantic mappings to the source repositories. A common vocabulary is used to provide the desired transparency. Mappings establish the correspondence between the common vocabulary and each of the source-specific vocabularies which are to be integrated. The common vocabulary may be tailored to the needs of an individual or group of users and/or applications and forms the basis for resolution of syntactic and semantic conflicts and ambiguities within a federation of information resources. The terms and constraints defined by the common vocabulary are then used to construct the query. The terms in the common vocabulary are mapped to each applicable sources vocabulary for query and retrieval purposes. By mapping the semantic characteristics of the various sources to the common vocabularly, the integrity of the individual source repositories, file systems, processes, and applications is maintained, while new applications and access methodologies can make use of the integrated resources.