An ontology-driven framework towards building enterprise semantic information layer

Enterprises Information Systems (EIS) have been applied for decades in Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) and Computer-Aided Design (CAD), where huge amount of increasing data is stored in the heterogeneous and distributed systems. As systems evaluating, system redesign and reengineering are demanded. A facing challenge is how to interoperate among different systems by overcoming the gap of conceptual heterogeneity. In this article, an enlarged data representation called semantic information layer (SIL) is described for facilitating heterogeneous systems interoperable. SIL plays a role as mediation media and knowledge representation among heterogeneous systems. The SIL building process is based on ontology engineering, including ontology extraction from relational database (RDB), ontology enrichment and ontology alignment. Mapping path will maintain the links between SIL and data source, and query implementation and user interface are for retrieving data and interacting with end users. We described fully a practical ontology-driven framework for building SIL and introduced extensively relevant standards and techniques for implementing the framework. In the core part of ontology development, a dynamic multi-strategies ontology alignment with automatic matcher selection and dynamic similarity aggregation is proposed. A demonstration case study in the scenario of mobile phone industry is used to illustrate the proposed framework.