Semantic Integration and Interoperability among Portals

Abstract

In distributed settings, such as that of the World Wide Web, where a large number of information sources and services reside, portals provide a single point of global access via a single and unified view. This view is circumscribed by a specific conceptualization and a specific vocabulary whose entries provide lexicalizations of the concepts used for shaping information, data, and services provided. Ontologies play a key role to shaping information, as they provide conceptualizations of domains. Different portals may use different or partially overlapping ontologies for shaping information, or even different schemata for storing data. This affects the integration of information from different portals, and the interoperability between the services that portals provide. Consequently, this situation affects recall and precision of information retrieval, and sets limitations to the composition (and decomposition) of services among portals for serving clients’ (users or software agents) requests