Description:
We examine semantic interoperability problems in the fixed income securities industry
and propose a knowledge representation architecture for context interchange
mediation to support dynamic integration of autonomous database, web, and
procedural sources of information. For sources and receivers sharing a common
subject domain, the mediator's reasoning engine can devise query plans integrating
multiple sources and resolving semantic heterogeneity. Receiver applications can
obtain the data they need in the form they need it without imposing changes on
sources. The architecture includes: 1) data models for each source and receiver, 2)
subject ontologies, containing abstract subject matter conceptualizations that would be
known to experienced practitioners in the industry, and 3) context models for each
source and receiver that explain how each data model implements the abstract
concepts from a subject ontology