Semantic Web-Based Information Systems: State-of-the-Art ...

General Adaptation Framework 75
three basic classes: devices, services, and humans. These resources represent realworld
objects that should interact in a certain way according to appropriate business
models. The adaptation of such heterogeneous resources in common sense lies in
providing an environment that would allow them to communicate in a unified way
via standard protocol.
The primary intention behind the General Adaptation Framework (GAF) is a design
of common framework for adaptation of heterogeneous resources. The design of
the framework will be divided into two layers:
1. Structured software design for modules, classes, behavior, and protocols
2. Semantic adaptation of different formalizations of the problem domain
edges
A semantic transformation is one of the key problems in the development of the
General Adaptation Framework. We assume that semantic annotation of data that
are used in communication between heterogeneous software components based on
common ontology (Farrar, Lewis, & Langendoen, 2002) will enable interoperability
(Malucelli & Oliveira, 2003).
At the moment, an arbitrary number of standards exists; these standards define each
other on different levels of abstraction and, thus, form a hierarchy. There are many
data models, and one of them that recently has gained wide adoption is Extensible
Markup Language (XML). The older and more tested data representation standard
is Relational Model. The novel data representation standards that focus primarily
Figure 8. Two-stage transformation
XML i
DB i
format (n) i
XSLT
Syntactical
transformation
layer
XML 0
format (n) 0
c:c Semantic
transformation
layer
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DB 0
RSCDF