Context interchange

Abstract

The Context Interchange strategy presents a novel perspective for mediated data access in which semantic conflicts among heterogeneous systems are not identified a priori, but are detected and reconciled by a context mediator through comparison of contexts axioms corresponding to the systems engaged in data exchange. In this article, we show that queries formulated on shared views, export schema, and shared “ontologies” can be mediated in the same way using the Context Interchange framework . The proposed framework provides a logic-based object-oriented formalsim for representing and reasoning about data semantics in disparate systems, and has been validated in a prototype implementation providing mediated data access to both traditional and web-based information sources.