Semantic Reconciliation of Business Documents in a SOA Framework

In this paper the main issues of an Ontology-based platform for semantic interoperability are illustrated. The solutions presented have been developed in the context of the Athena, an IST Integrated Project focused on interoperability problems in the business sector. The illustrated platform, and the associated methodology, is based on the use of computational ontologies, aiming at the reconciliation of conceptual, structural, and formatting differences that hamper information exchange between two enterprise software applications. The proposed approach relies on the availability of a domain ontology, used as a semantic reference for the cooperating systems. The ontology, contrasted with a local schema, allows semantic mismatches that hinder a seamless interoperability to be identified. Having illustrated the underlying approach, we briefly report on the tools that compose this Semantic suite and, eventually on the results drawn from a few business cases.