Resolving ontological heterogeneity in the kraft project

Abstract

KRAFT is an agent architecture for the integration of heterogeneous information systems. The focus in KRAFT is on the integration of knowledge in the form of constraints. In this article we describe the architecture from an ontological perspective. We start by introducing the agent architecture and illustrate its application in the telecommunication-network design. We then describe how we assess the ontological heterogeneity in the domain, which problems the integration of constraint knowledge pose, and how we construct a shared ontology. Also, we describe the mapping^ functions that are used to translate information between the shared and the local ontologies. Finally, we look at the direction our research is taking hereafter.