Abstract

No man is an island Entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent.…….-John Donne (1572-1631)
One of the challenges for knowledge-based systems is interoperation with other software, intelligent or not. In recent years, our research group has participated in various integration efforts in which interoperation was supported through translation techniques, mostly at the syntactic level and more recently through ontology-based approaches. In this chapter, I argue that the interoperation challenge will not be met with current approaches, since they entail trapping knowledge into formal representations that are seldom shareable and often hard to translate, seriously impairing their mobility. I propose an approach to develop knowledge bases that captures at different levels of formality and specificity how each piece of knowledge in a system was derived from original sources, which are often Web sources. If a knowledge base contains a trace of information about how each piece of knowledge was defined, it will be possible to develop interoperation tools that take advantage of this information. The contents of knowledge bases will then be more mobile and no longer be confined within a formalism. The

Date

January 27, 2003

Authors

Yolanda Gil

Conference

Spinning the Semantic Web

Pages

253-278