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Requirements for continuing progress in Information Systems usability are surveyed and analyzed.

Nowadays, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) constitutes a real and growing need for most of enterprises, particularly for large and dynamic ones. Actually, the major problem of EAI is the heterogeneity problem, especially the semantic one. This latter is not correctly addressed by today's integration solutions, which focus mainly on syntactical integration. Dealing with the semantic aspect, which will certainly promote EAI by providing it more consistency and robustness, needs some appropriate principles such as ontology urbanization and mediation. These latter that constitute the main focus of this paper aim to favor the semantic application integration allowing to correctly capture, structure, master and reason upon the semantics, which currently constitutes a big challenge for several enterprises that are in quest of more flexibility and manageability.

In this paper, we discuss how ontology plays roles in building a distributed and heterogeneous knowledge-base system. First, we discuss relationship between ontology and agents in the which is a framework of knowledge sharing and reuse based on a multi-agent architecture. Ontology is a minimum requirement for each agent to join the . Second, we explain mediation by ontology to show how ontology is used in the . A special agent called mediator analyzes undirected messages and infer candidates of recipient agents by consulting ontology and relationship between ontology and agents. Third, we model ontology as combination of aspects each of which can represent a way of conceptualization. Aspects are combined either as combination aspect which means integration of aspects or category aspect which means choice of aspects. Since ontology by aspect allows heterogeneous and multiple descriptions for phenomenon in the world, it is appropriate for heterogeneous knowledge-base systems. We also show translation of messages as a way of interpreting multiple aspects. A translation agent can translate a message with some aspect to one with another aspect by analyzing dependency of aspects. Mediation and translation of messages are important to build agents easily and naturally because less knowledge on other agents is requested for each agent.

This paper describes a formalism for context mediation based on Feature Logic. The formalism enables a distinction to be drawn between integrity and translational aspects of mediation. It is independent of the relational model, though easily used within it. The formalism makes precise the concept of "context" and provides a framework for mediation between disparate data sources.