MENTOR: an enabler for interoperable intelligent systems

A community with knowledge organisation based on ontologies will enable an increase in the computational intelligence of its information systems. However, due to the worldwide diversity of communities, a high number of knowledge representation elements, which are not semantically coincident, have appeared representing the same segment of reality, becoming a barrier to business communications. Even if a domain community uses the same kind of technologies in its information systems, such as ontologies, it doesn't solve its semantics differences. In order to solve this interoperability problem, a solution is to use a reference ontology as an intermediary in the communications between the community enterprises and the outside, while allowing the enterprises to keep their own ontology and semantics unchanged internally. This work proposes MENTOR, a methodology to support the development of a common reference ontology for a group of organisations sharing the same business domain. This methodology is based on the mediator ontology (MO) concept, which assists the semantic transformations among each enterprise's ontology and the referential one. The MO enables each organisation to keep its own terminology, glossary and ontological structures, while providing seamless communication and interaction with the others.