Semantic Consistency Maintenance in Editing Cross-Context Common Vocabulary

In e-business, creating a common vocabulary for business integration, interoperation and interaction has to consider the heterogeneity reality of different interpretations from multiple term providers. Maintaining semantic consistency between multiple vocabulary providers is a difficult problem. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a novel cross-context collaborative vocabulary editing approach. This approach introduces a semantically consistent representation for terms, vocabularies and operations. It presents a cross-context semantic consistency maintenance model. To satisfy this model, it achieves context commonality by proposing a distributed, two-layered, role-based, and partially-replicated system architecture. It achieves concept equivalence by collaborative term mapping, multi-copy and arbitration. It satisfies structure mappability through a novel term identifier scheme. An integrated DO-scheme of ADD, MODIFY, DELETE and ARBITRATE has been devised to discuss an integrated solution to cross-context semantic consistency maintenance. The proposed vocabulary editing system has been implemented in a CHCES system.