We describe a novel approach by which software can assess the ability of a confederation of heterogeneous systems to interoperate to achieve a given purpose. The approach uses ontologies and knowl- edge bases (KBs) to capture the salient characteristics of systems, on the one hand, and of tasks for which these systems will be employed, on the other. Rules are used to represent the conditions under which the capabilities provided by systems can fulfill the capabilities needed to support the roles and interactions that make up each task. An Analyzer component employs these KBs and rules to determine if a given con- federation will be adequate, to generate suitable confederations from a collection of available systems, to pre-diagnose potential interoperability problems that might arise, and to suggest system configuration options that will help to make interoperability possible. We have demonstrated the feasibility of this approach using a prototype Analyzer and KBs.

@inproceedings{ISWC07-onistt,
  author    = {Daniel Elenius and
               Reginald Ford and
               Grit Denker and
               David Martin and
               Mark Johnson},
  title     = {Purpose-Aware Reasoning about Interoperability of Heterogeneous
               Training Systems}, 
  booktitle     = {The Semantic Web, 6th International Semantic Web Conference,
               2nd Asian Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2007 + ASWC 2007,
               Busan, Korea, November 11-15, 2007},
  publisher = {Springer},
  series    = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
  volume    = {4825},
  year      = {2007},
  isbn      = {978-3-540-76297-3},
  pages     = {750-763},
  ee        = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-76298-0_54},
  bibsource = {DBLP, http://dblp.uni-trier.de}
}

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