Ontology Mapping: A Way Out of the Medical Tower of Babel?

  • Frank van Harmelen
Conference paper
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 3581)

Abstract

Integration of different information sources has been a problem that has been challenging (or perhaps better: plaguing) Computer Science throughout the decades. As soon as we had two computers, we wanted to exchange information between them, and as soon as we had two databases, we wanted to link them together.

Fortunately, Computer Science has made much progress on different levels:

Physical interoperability between systems has been all but solved: with the advent of hardware standards such as Ethernet, and with protocols such as TCP/IP and HTTP, we can nowadays walk into somebody’s house or office, and successfully plug our computer into the network, giving instant world-wide physical connectivity.

Physical connectivity is not sufficient. We must also agree on the syntactic form of the messages we will exchange. Again, much progress has been made in recent years, with open standards such HTML and XML.

Keywords

Linguistic Label Ontology Mapping Semantic Interoperability Syntactic Form Physical Connectivity 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005

Authors and Affiliations

  • Frank van Harmelen
    • 1
  1. 1.Dept. of Artificial IntelligenceVrije Universiteit AmsterdamAmsterdamNetherlands

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