Coordinating knowledge elicitation to support context construction in cooperative information systems

Two popular semantic reconciliation techniques namely, the Concept Hierarchy Model and the Summary Schema Model, are evaluated for their strengths and limitations in facilitating cooperation between heterogeneous information systems. These techniques fail to recognize that reconciliation is context dependent, and context construction is a nonmonotonic process which requires coordinating multiple sources of semantic knowledge pertinent to a specific request. We show how their limitations can be overcome, while exploiting their strengths, in the SCOPES (Semantic Coordinator Over Parallel Exploration Spaces) architecture. SCOPES (A. Ouksel and C. Naiman, 1994) basically provides the coordination mechanism that elicits the knowledge necessary to build the context for reconciliation.