Semantic Interoperability and What Natural Languages Like English Can Teach us

Table of Links

• Abstract & Introduction
• Interoperability
• Semantic interoperability and what natural languages like English can teach us
• Requirements for successfully communicating terms and statements
• Parallels between the structure of natural language statements and data schemata with implications for semantic interoperability
• What makes a term a good term and a schema a good schema?
• The need for a machine-actionable Rosetta Stone for (meta)data that acts as an interlingua for specifying reference terms and reference schemata to support cognitive and semantic interoperability
• Rosetta Stone and machine-readability: UPRIs, XML Schema datatypes, and RDF for communicating terms, datatypes, and statements
• Rosetta Stone and machine-interpretability: Wikidata and a modeling paradigm for (meta)data statements based on English
• Rosetta Stone and semantic interoperability: Specifying term mappings and schema crosswalks
• Rosetta Stone and cognitive interoperability: Specifying display templates and using a query builder
• Discussion
• Related work
• Conclusion, Acknowledgements, & References

Semantic interoperability and what natural languages like English can teach us

The EOSC Interoperability Framework (20) characterizes semantic interoperability as a requirement for enabling machine-actionability between information systems, and it is achieved “when the information transferred has, in its communicated form, all of the meaning required for the receiving system to interpret it correctly” (p. 11).

To understand what semantic interoperability means at a conceptual level, it is helpful to consider how we as humans communicate meaning (i.e., semantic content) in a natural language such as English, using terms and statements as the basic units of meaning that carrying information. And when we talk about communication, we mean the attempt to create the same cognitive representation of information in the receiver as is present in the sender.