An Ontology-Based Method for Semantic Integration of Business Components

Abstract

Building new business information systems from reusable components is today an approach widely adopted and used. Using this approach in analysis and design phases presents a great interest and requires the use of a particular class of components called Business Components (BC). Business Components are today developed by several manufacturers and are available in many repositories. However, reusing and integrating them in a new Information System requires detection and resolution of semantic conflicts. Moreover, most of integration and semantic conflict resolution systems rely on ontology alignment methods based on domain ontology. This work is positioned at the intersection of two research areas: Integration of reusable Business Components and alignment of ontologies for semantic conflict resolution. Our contribution concerns both the proposal of a BC integration solution based on ontologies alignment and a method for enriching the domain ontology used as a support for alignment.Comment: IEEE New Technologies of Distributed Systems (NOTERE), 2011 11th Annual International Conference; ISSN: 2162-1896 Print ISBN: 978-1-4577-0729-2 INSPEC Accession Number: 12122775 201

Semantic Integration Process of Business Components to Support Information System Designers

“…Several studies have focused on the transformation of BC described in modelling languages such as UML to ontologies. We have proposed in [5] and [6] integration processes that reduces the problem of semantic integration of BC to a problem of ontologies alignment. We are based on the definition proposed in [12] to define integration of business components: The integration of business components takes a set of components: BC1… BCn and correspondence model C1….n between them as input and combines their elements into a new output component BC1.... n.…”

“…Semantic integration of BC consists to attribute meaning to data and services in order to ensure their integration among heterogeneous BC and thus to allow their integration into the same IS. We propose in this section an extension of the solution that we have presented previously in [5], [6]. Our solution allows:…”

“…This step consists in aligning ontologies obtained from the transformation of BC. We can use any alignment method based on targeted complementary resources, also called background ontologies or support ontologies [21,] [16], [23] and [6]. The domain ontology plays the role of targeted complementary resource and thus will be the support of ontologies alignment.…”

“…In fact, Integrating into the same IS of several business components which emanate from various sources produces different conflicts both syntactic and semantic. We focus in this work on detecting and resolving semantic name conflicts encountered during the integration process of business components [5], [6] and [7]. We assume that the design of an IS intended generally a business domain and that business components model fragments of this domain.…”

“…However, this solution allows creating semantic relations between concepts that may generate conflicts, but does not present how to use this relationship as to achieve semantic integration. To overcome this insufficiency, we propose an extension of our semantic process integration [6], in the present work using rules derived from semantics relations detected in semantic matching process in order to generate actions for resolving conflicts for propose to information system designers. We will validate our results using a prototype that we have developed and tested on domain ontology and some BC.…”