To establish effective information exchange among applications in a distributed environment, participants not only share their functions and service interfaces, but often exchange data models. This paper proposes the use of ontologies to represent data models thus allowing applications to locate and integrate these models. A reference ontology based approach for service oriented ontology management is introduced. Specifically, a domain-specific reference ontology for use in the evaluation of a practical case is developed. To validate and evaluate the approach, a prototype system is developed to provide ontology deploying, browsing and mapping operations based on a service-oriented system. Experiments provide promising results that are consistent with the original ideas of managing ontologies and optimizing ontology mappings to facilitate data interoperability in a distributed environment.
A review of composite product data interoperability and product life-cycle management challenges in the composites industry
