From Semantic Integration to Semantics Management: Case Studies and a Way Forward

For meaningful information exchange or integration, providers and consumers need compatible semantics between source and target systems. It is widely recognized that achieving this semantic integration is very costly. Nearly all the published research concerns how system integrators can discover and exploit semantic knowledge in order to better share data among the systems they already have. This research is very important, but to make the greatest impact, we must go beyond after-the-fact semantic integration among existing systems, to actively guiding semantic choices in new ontologies and systems — e.g., what concepts should be used as descriptive vocabularies for existing data, or as definitions for newly built systems. The goal is to ease data sharing for both new and old systems, to ensure that needed data is actually collected, and to maximize over time the business value of an enterprise's information systems.