Virtual merging of Ecoin applications and guidelines for building ontologies

Abstract

The Ecoin system is used to perform context mediation among heterogeneous data sources. Ecoin applications present a fundamental module in the Ecoin system that are used to describe a domain of interest and to perform context mediation on data from that domain. We describe the CLAMP tool, which facilitates merging individual Ecoin applications so that the context mediation functionality of two domains of interest are combined in one single application. We also demonstrate some principles for building one of the most critical parts of an Ecoin application--the ontology--and build a sample ontology step-by-step using these principles.