Abstract:
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a key technology to support
interoperability among data and processing resources. Semantic interoperability
requires mapping between vocabularies of independently developed resources,
a task fraught with uncertainty. Probabilistic ontologies enable representation of
knowledge in domains characterized by uncertainty. As such, they promise to
improve the quality of service descriptions, enable more thorough analysis of
service composition opportunities, and provide a theoretically sound methodology
for semantic mapping under uncertainty. This paper defines probabilistic
ontologies, discusses their application to SOA, and presents a conceptual
scheme for using a federation of ontologies (with both common and probabilistic
ontologies) as a semantic mapping tool for service oriented information exchange
systems with different levels of service descriptions (including legacy
and probabilistic enabled descriptions).
