Semantic interoperability: methodological proposal for the semantic mapping between KOS in Heterogeneous Systems

Abstract

Nowadays, issues related to semantic interoperation arise in the context of all the technological advancement and the
diversity of repositories, databases and users along with the variety of terminologies for the treatment and retrieval of
information. In the scope of Information Science, semantic mapping is one of the procedures to solve these problems
of heterogeneity, when related to the diversity of vocabularies existing in the various repositories and information bases.
Mapping is the process of establishing relationships between concepts from one vocabulary to others and is used widely to
achieve syntactic and semantic interoperability in KOS. In this article, to address such a problem, we present I. Dahlberg’s
methodological proposal, in which mapping is the first step in order to identify the level of compatibility between KOS, that
are named by this author of Ordering Systems. There is the purpose of allowing the common use of these languages, when
searches in different databases are made or when it is desired to exchange information indexed with these languages.

Keywords: Semantic interoperability. Semantic Mapping. KOS. Heterogeneous Systems.