Funding Agency: The National Institute of Standards and Technology (Department of Commerce)
Interoperability is the most critical issue facing organizations that need to access information from multiple information systems. Our objective in this research is to develop a comprehensive framework and methodology to facilitate semantic interoperability among distributed and heterogeneous information systems specifically focused on manufacturing information and applications. Our proposed framework will provide a unified view of the underlying representational and reasoning formalism for the mediating among diverse information sources process. We propose to (a) develop a semantic model for explicitly capturing the meaning of diverse manufacturing information sources; (b) Define an ontology for representing various types of semantic conflicts typically found in a manufacturing domain (c) Develop and evaluate a mechanism for using the semantic model and the ontology to automate the process of detecting and resolving semantic conflicts among multiple heterogeneous manufacturing information sources. To accomplish this we will propose ways to incorporate the model and ontology into a software tool. We will also evaluate the model, ontology and the interoperability mechanism in the manufacturing domain by using a series of test scenarios and case studies.
