MFI-3: An Enabler for Semantic Interoperation between Enterprise Information Resources

Enterprise information resources describe the characteristics of an enterprise from different perspectives. Effective management of information resources plays an important role in the business decision-making process. However, interoperation between information resources has always been a hard issue due to the difference in syntax and semantics. Establishing ontologies for enterprise information resources and using ontology mapping techniques to achieve semantic interoperability provides a viable solution for the above-mentioned problem. ISO/IEC 19763-3 (MFI-3)1 provides a metamodel for the registration of structural and evolutionary information about ontologies. It can help to eliminate the "blind spots" phenomenon in the ontology searching process, which is caused by the language or technical specialties. This paper explains the rational of MFI-3 and illustrates its usage in the semantic interoperation between enterprises.