Andy Jordan

Interoperability between information systems is rapidly becoming an increasingly difficult issue, in particular where data is to be exchanged with external entities. Although standard naming conventions and forms of representation have been established, significant discrepancies remain between different implementations of the same standards and between different standards within the same domain. Furthermore, current approaches for bridging such heterogeneities are incomplete or do not scale well to real-world problems. We present a pragmatic approach to interoperability, where ontologies are leveraged to annotate proto-typical information fragments in order to facilitate automated transformation between fragments in different standards and representations. We discuss our approach based on an example drawn from the oil and gas industry.