13

What Problems Do Ontologies Help Solve?
•Heterogeneous database problem
–Different organizational units, Service Needers/Providers have radically different databases
–Different syntactically: what’s the format?
–Different structurally: how are they structured?
–Different semantically: what do they mean?
–They all speak different languages (access, description, schemas, meaning)
–Integration: rather than N2 problem, with single, adequate Ontology reduces to N
όEnterprise-wide system interoperability problem
–Currently: system-of-systems, vertical stovepipes
–Ontologies act as conceptual model representing enterprise consensus semantics
•Relevant document retrieval/question-answering problem
–What is the meaning of your query?
–What is the meaning of documents that would satisfy your query?
–Can you obtain only meaningful, relevant documents?
–
•