Conceptual Models and Architectures for Advanced Information Systems

摘要

This paper addresses several issues related to the use of conceptual modeling to support service-oriented, advanced information systems. It shows how conceptual modeling of information resources can be used to integrate information obtained from multiple data sources, including both internal and external data. The notion of an intelligent thesaurus is presented and a meta-model of the thesaurus is developed. It is then used to create a three-layer architecture consisting of the actual data source schemas, a “wrapped” object-oriented abstraction of the schemas expressed in terms of the thesaurus primitives, and an integrated version which serves as the federation schema. The sharing of information among constituents is also addressed, and a special export schema—the export data/knowledge/task schema—is proposed that ties together the objects, their constraints, and their usage rules. Knowledge sharing among constituents during cooperative query processing is accomplished using data/knowledge packets.