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Ontology and integration: managing application semantics using ontologies and supporting W3C standards.

Article Excerpt
Many in the world of application integration have begun to adopt the notion of ontology (or the instances of ontology: ontologies). Ontology is a term borrowed from philosophy that refers to the science of describing the kinds of entities in the world and how they are related.

Ontologies are important to application integration solutions because they provide a shared and common understanding of data (and, in some cases, services and processes) that exists with in an application integration problem domain, and how to facilitate communication between people and information systems. By leveraging this concept we call organize and share enterprise information, as well as manage content and knowledge, which allows better interoperability and integration of inter--and intra-company information systems. We can also layer common ontologies within verticals, or domains with repeatable patterns.

When dealing with application integration, as you know by now, we are dealing with much complexity. The notion of ontologies helps the application integration architect prepare generalizations that make the problem domain more understandable. In contrast to abstraction, generalization ignores many of the details and ends up with general ideas. Therefore, when generalizing, we start with a collection of types and analyze commonalities to generalize them.

Clearly, semantic heterogeneity and divergence hinders the notion of generalization, and as commonalities of two entities are represented in semantically different ways, the differences are...