Using ontology and XML for semantic integration of electricity information systems

Nowadays, semantic integration of information systems is becoming a hot topic. Electricity information systems are the heterogeneous system with decentralized organizations and functions. As there is a growing apprehension of extensible markup language (XML) as a means for data exchange, this paper focuses on the ontology-based semantic integration using XML technology for electricity information systems. Firstly, we discuss semantic heterogeneities in XML documents of electricity data and describe how ontologies can be used to overcome related problems. Then we propose the architecture for semantic integration, including three main layers: distributed heterogeneous data sources layer, information integration layer and application systems layer. We discuss the approach to semantic integration of XML documents, which is applied in the architecture. At the end we conclude that ontology is a good tool to integrate electricity information at semantic level.