Constructing global view with an ontology-based method for information sharing in the virtual organization

The problem of constructing global view of heterogeneous information sources for information sharing is becoming more and more important due to the availability of multiple information sources within the virtual organization. Global view is defined to provide a unified representation of the information in the different sources by analyzing concept schemas associated with them and resolving possible semantic heterogeneity. An ontology-based method for global view construction is proposed. In the method, (1) Based on the formal ontologies, the concept of semantic affinity is introduced to assess the level of semantic relationship between information classes from different information sources; (2) Information classes are classified by semantic affinity levels using clustering procedures so that their different representations can be analyzed for unification; (3) Global view is constructed starting from selected clusters by unifying representation of their elements. The application example of using the method in the joint-aerial defense organization is illustrated and the result shows that the proposed method is feasible.