Principles of Semantic Interoperation

该研究项目的主要目标是发现异类信息系统之间语义互操作的基础和实现原则。这类系统由广泛多样的本地自治组件组成，具有潜在的复杂的相互约束。一个主要的技术挑战是设计可以在许多组件上执行的活动，但仍然保持全局语义要求，即信息的整体完整性。该研究项目通过以下方式解决上述挑战：(A)创新表示法，以在统一的数学框架中捕获数据和活动的语义；(B)开发关于上述语义的推理技术，以获得对数据的最大程度放松的语义约束；(C)制定设计规则，通过其可以系统地指定复杂的活动；以及(D)在原型自动推理工具中实现设计规则，以帮助捕获和验证不同类型活动的规范。该项目的中心部分是针对问题分类对开发的技术进行评估和迭代改进。自动推理工具极大地促进了持续评估，这对于发现语义互操作的持久科学原则至关重要。

The key objective of this research project is to discover principles that underlie and enable the semantic interoperation of heterogeneous information systems. Such systems comprise widely diverse and locally autonomous components with potentially intricate mutual constraints. A major technical challenge is to design activities that may execute over a number of components, but nevertheless preserve the global semantic requirements, i.e., the integrity of the information at large. This research project addresses the above challenge by (a) innovating representations that capture the semantics of data and activities in a unified mathematical framework; (b) developing techniques for reasoning about the above semantics to derive the maximally relaxed semantic constraints on data; (c) formulating design rules through which complex activities can be systematically specified; and (d) implementing the design rules in a prototype automated reasoning tool to assist in capturing and validating specifications of heterogeneous activities. A centerpiece of this project is the evaluation and iterative refinement of the developed techniques with respect to a taxonomy of problems. Continuous evaluation, greatly facilitated by the automated reasoning tool, is essential for discovering the lasting scientific principles of semantic interoperation.