An algebra for semantic interoperability of information sources

Resolving heterogeneity among the various biological information systems is a crucial problem if we wish to gain value from the many distributed resources available to us. For example, information from multiple protein databases (e.g., Swiss-Prot and PDB) might need to be composed to answer queries posed by end-users. Problems of heterogeneity in hardware, operating systems, interfaces and data structures have been widely addressed, but issues of diverse semantics have been handled mainly in an ad-hoc fashion. This paper highlights the ONION (ONtology compositION) system that enables semantic interoperation among various information sources by articulating the ontologies associated with them. An articulation focuses on the semantically relevant intersection of information resources. Although the generation of articulations (semantic correspondences between the ontologies) cannot be fully automated, we take a semi-automatic approach. ONION uses heuristic algorithms for the automatic generation of suggested articulations. This paper outlines an algebra for ontology composition based on their articulations. We show the properties of the algebraic operators and how they depend upon the articulation functions that generate the articulations. Query optimization is enabled based on the properties of the algebraic operators.