What is Ontological Commitments

Research in information systems interoperability is motivated by the ever-increasing heterogeneity of the computer world. New generations of applications, such as geographic information systems (GISs), have much more demands in comparison to possibilities of legacy information systems and traditional database technology. The popularity of GIS in governmental and municipality institutions induce increasing amounts of available information (Stoimenov, Ðordevic-Kajan, & Stojanovic, 2000). In a local community environment (city services, local offices, local telecom, public utilities, water and power supply services, etc.), different information systems deal with huge amounts of available information, where most data in databases are geo-referenced. GIS applications often have to process geo-data obtained from various geo-information communities. Also, information that exists in different spatial database may be useful for many other GIS applications. Numerous legacy systems should be coupled with GIS systems, which present additional difficulties in developing end-user applications.