Instance assisted semantic interoperability for distributed digital museums

The distribution and heterogeneity of information raise several challenges for systems to search and retrieve information mutually. One critical foundation for coordinated action in multi-systems is the ability to exchange representational objects that can be locally interpreted in ways that make sense. Coherent local interpretation of shared representations is needed to create global semantic coherence for the distributed systems. Ontology technology is a useful approach to information integration. But when the categories of the relative concepts of ontologies are different, the semantic interoperation will encounter new obstacles. Except that the schema carries information, the data also carry abundant information, which assists to further interoperate. In the paper, a semantic interoperation framework is proposed which adopts instance assisted ontology technology. The implementation of the framework in distributed Xu Beihong's Galleries is discussed in detail. The emphasis is the process of ontology integration and the approach to further semantic interoperation using instances. In the end, the more interrelated problems are further discussed.