DSS-Based Ontology Alignment in Solid Reference System Configuration

uebe.Q is a managing software for solid referential information systems, such as ISO 9000 (for quality) and ISO 1400 (for environment). This is a long-term developed software, encompassing extensive and solid business logic with a long and successful record of deployments. A recent business model change imposed that the evolution and configuration of the software, shifts from the company (and especially the development team) to consultants and other business partners, along with the fact that different systems and respective data/information need to be integrated with minimal intervention of the development team. The so far acceptable rigidity, fragility, immobility and opacity of the software became a problem. Especially, the system was prepared to deal with a specific database respecting a specific schema and code-defined semantics. This paper describes the approach taken to overcome the problems derived form the previous architecture, by adopting (i) ontologies for the specification of business concepts and (ii) an information-integration Decision Support System (DSS) for mapping the domain specific ontologies to the database schemas.