Domain Ontology Management Environment

Service-oriented business-to-business e-commerce requires dynamic and open interoperable information systems. Although most large organisations have information regarding products, services and customers stored in databases, and XML/DTD allows these to be published over the Internet, sharing information among these systems has been prevented by semantic heterogeneity. True electronic commerce will not happen until the semantics of the terms used to model these information systems can be captured and processed by computers. Developing a machine processable ontology (vocabulary) is intrinsically hard. The semantics of a term varies from one context to another. We believe ontology engineering will be a major effort of any future application development. In this paper we describe our work on building a Domain Ontology Management Environment (DOME). DOME is developing techniques for ontology-based information content description and a suite of tools for domain ontology management. Information content description extends traditional meta data to an ontology. This makes it possible to dynamically find relevant data sources based on content and to integrate them as needed.