POSC-Caesar FIATECH IDS-ADI Projects

Intelligent Data Sets Accelerating Deployment of ISO15926

Realizing Open Information Interoperability

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Automated Mapping: Reduction to a Common Base Set

One of the paths to interoperability that can be explored is that of a set of generated mappings for any given point to point integration.

Requirements

The requirement is that both reference data sets can be reduced to a common base set of relations via rule-based means using a single rule language.

Limitations

The main limitation is that for many sets of coarse-to-fine generated reference data, it is highly unlikely that a rule language will actually be able to be used to reduce the entire set of original reference data down to a common base set that is consistent enough to be able to perform analysis and reasoning upon, which is likely to be a pre-requisite for being able to generate the the mapping.

Accommodation

Since this likely limitation can be recognized at the outset, it would be worthwhile investing in techniques that can ensure for example, that a coarse-to-fine generated reference data set (such as one based on a linguistic approach) is reducible to a consistent first-order logic model. With this accommodation in place the risk of not being able to generate mappings could be somewhat ameliorated.

Fidelity

Fidelity is another area that could suffer with such an approach, however, not more so particularly than with any other mapping mechanism though. Again, if a methodology can be devised which drives explicitness and precision in the definition of such a reference data set, then the fidelity problems can be circumvented to some degree.

Cost

Generating mappings from a rule language can substantially reduce the cost of translating in a peer-to-peer or spoke-to-hub scenario, especially if it is late binding.

Approach

99% of the definitions that will be imported into the WIP from existing sources will have been arrived at through coarse-to-fine approaches, and 99% of those again will have no longhands (ie. base relation derivations) to start with.

So the RDS/WIP then becomes a crucial environment for people to collaboratively develop these base derivations. As formerly mentioned, many will not be logically consistent, at least in the first order logic sense, but that knowledge at least allows the user to scope and cost that aspect of the integration exercise - knowing that some percentage will require special attention.

Conclusions

Being able to do this at all is predicated on the idea that imperfect (that is to say, unexpanded and/or illogical) predicates must be able to be present in the RDS/WIP.

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