Ontology Modularity, Information Flow, and Interaction-Situated Semantics - Extended Abstract

Abstract

Originally, software applications, databases, and expert systems were designed and constructed by a reduced group of software or knowledge engineers, which had overall control of the entire life cycle of IT artifacts. But this time has long gone as software and knowledge engineering practice has shifted from the implementation of custom-made stand-alone systems to component-based engineering; databases are gradually deployed in distributed architectures and subsequently federated; and knowledge-based systems are built by reusing more and more previously constructed knowledge bases and inference engines. Moreover, the distributed nature of IT systems has experienced a dramatic explosion with the arrival and generalised use of the Internet. The World Wide Web, and its ambitious extension, the Semantic Web, has brought an unprecedented global distribution of information in form of hypertext documents, online databases, open-source code, terminological repositories, web services, blogs, etc., which continually challenge the traditional role of IT in our society. As a consequence, modularity has been a necessity for any large-scale engineering task. But, although modularity has been thoroughly studied in software and knowledge engineering, the composition and interaction of IT components at the level of distribution on the Web is still at its infancy, and we are just grasping the scope of this endeavour: Successful IT component interoperability beyond basic syntactic communication is very hard, and our era’s basic commodity around which all IT technology is evolving, namely information, is not yet well understood. The focus of the problem with understanding information is that we need ways with which we can reveal, expose and communicate the semantic aspect of information. As of today, component-based software engineering is a difficult task, still subject of cutting-edge research in computer science; putting together different databases has proved to be successful only for closed environments and under very strong assumptions; the same holds for distributed artificial intelligence applications and interaction in multi-agent systems. While we were staying on entirely syntactic issues, it has been relatively easy to achieve component interoperability. But as soon as we tried to deal with the semantic aspect of information, looking for “intelligent”