Preface to ONISW 2007

Abstract

The emergence of the World Wide Web made massive amounts of data available. Data exist in many scattered electronic data sources (e-sources) over the Web. Even though some of the data are in well-organized data sources, interoperability and integration with data from other sources, semantic coordination and conflict resolution are required for its full exploitation. Semantic Web-enabled applications can potentially produce better results for semantic integration, interoperability and search. In particular, ontologies are widely regarded as the best solution to global information integration and semantic interoperability.

A crucial question is whether ontologies can replace information models. But whereas ontologies work quite well as virtual schemata in mediation systems, they may perform poorly as information models and on the user interface level. On the theoretical side, there is a lack of understanding of the effective relation and interplay of ontological and epistemological features in information models and systems. Furthermore there are still open questions concerning good scientific practice in developing ontologies. On the practical side, there is still a lack of good practice of how to integrate existing information systems into ontology-driven applications and few experiences at all with creating good new data structures from ontologies directly for interoperation in complex and diverse application environments.