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This is the glossary based on input from Adrian. Once we have input from other component/deliverables owners, I will update this glossary and resolve conflicts. I suggest to have a glossary on the web rather than in a deliverable.


Alignment: Set of mappings between ontologies having the role of reconciling the overlapping subsets of the two ontologies.

Compound Item: A compound item is an item having at least one description.

Context: A context represents a subset of a view and presents only the relevant information for the current step of the mapping process. The contexts can be seen as horizontal subsets of a view - a given set of ontological entities and relationships from a view are presented.

Description Item: An item describing a compound item (sometimes called just description).

Item: Graphical representation of a role in a view tree.

Mappings: These express semantic relationships between two or more elements of ontologies. A mapping can refer to conditional statements that have to hold for the semantic relationship to hold. Such mappings are represented in abstract form and they don't have any formal semantics associated with them.

Mapping Rules: The mapping rules are obtained by grounding the abstract mappings to a concrete ontology representation language. In this document, we refer to Flora-2 mapping rules obtained by applying the Flora-2 grounding on the abstract mappings.

Ontology Mediation: The process of creating an alignment between different ontologies.

Primitive Item: An item having no description associated.

Role: A placeholder for ontology entities that is used in general algorithms and strategies.

Successor: The primitive or compound item which the description points to.

View: A subset of the ontology entities and the relationships existing between them. The views can be seen as vertical subsets of the ontology - all the entities and relationships of a specific type (dictated by each particular view) from the ontology are considered.


Activity: Function or task that occurs over time and has recognizable results.

Business entity: Participant in an interaction; the requestor or the provider of a service.

Business process: Collection of activities designed to produced specific outputs based on specific inputs.

Endpoint: Business entity.

Process equivalence: Full matching of the communication pattern of the two participants in a conversation.