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SIM Mediation - Demo

This demo illustrating the SIM Mediation is structured in three sections as follows:

• The Problem
• The Solution
• Online Demo - .Net, Java

Note: The flexibility of a solution based on the SIM is demonstrated in the Validation Demo.

The Problem: Semantic Conflict

The Social Welfare Agency (SWA) is responsible for granting social benefits. When a citizen applies for a benefit, a sequence of four steps takes place: (i) the citizen logs into the portal; (ii) the citizen applies for a benefit filling a form with his personal data and submitting it; (iii) the SWA receives the form and validates it according current regulations; (iv) if valid, the SWA cross-check data with other agencies, in particular, asks the Register Office (RO) if the records match the data submitted by the applicant.

The exchange of data between SWA and RO is not automated. This lack of automation is due to the fact that the two organize their records around different concepts. While the RO use the concept of Household - a group of people sharing a Residence - the SWA use the concept of Family - a group of people related through family bonds that may or may not share a Residence. This semantic conflict is depicted in Figure 1, which shows both the SWA's schema (swa.xsd) and the RO's schema (ro.xsd). There is a semantic conflict between the concepts of Household and Family since the members of a household may not belong to the same family, and conversely persons constituting a family may not live together as part of a single household.

There is a need for automating the exchange of information between SWA and RO. The SIM Mediation can be used as a basis to fulfill this need.

Solution: SIM Mediation

The artifacts shown in Figure 2 must be developed by the cooperating organizations. The swa.owl and ro.owl files contain the local ontologies describing the SWA vocabulary - structured through the swa.xsd schema - and the RO vocabulary - structured through the ro.xsd schema. The swa-ro.owl is the mediation ontology used by the SIM Mediation during data exchanges. In addition, the lift-swa.xsl transforms the information in the original schema format (swa.xsd) into class individuals defined in the local ontology (swa.owl), and the projection (projection-ro.xml) specifies which ontology components can be projected into the ro.xsd schema.

Online Demo - .Net, Java

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