Semantic unification

Semantic Unification has a long history in fields like philosophy and linguistics. In computer science it has been used in different research areas like grammar unification [1] [2] , and Prolog extensions [3] . For business processes and workflow management the term is relatively new. In the earliest 90’s [Charles Petri] introduces the term of semantic unification for business models, later references could be found in [4] [5] and later formalized in the PhD Thesis from [http://www.FawsyBendeck.com Fawsy Bendeck] The semantic unification research field is based on the idea that there are lexically different concept representations with the same semantic (i.e. meaning).

Semantic unification is the process of mapping two concepts to one common semantic (if it exists). [5] define Semantic Unification as: “the mapping of two expressions onto an expression in an exchange format which is equivalent to the given expression”

Petri [6] introduces the term “Pragmatic Semantic Unification” to refer to the approaches in which the results are tested against a running application using the semantic mappings. In this pragmatic approach, the accuracy of the mapping is not as important as its usability.

[1] Jonathan Calder, Mike Reape, and Hank Zeevat,, An algorithm for generation in unification categorial grammar. In Proceedings of the 4th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 233-240, Manchester, England (10-12 April), University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, 1989. [2] Graeme Hirst and David St-Onge, Lexical chains as representations of context for the detection and correction of malapropisms, 1998.

[3] [http://www.FawsyBendeck.com Fawsy Bendeck] , [http://www.uni-trier.de/index.php?id=20230 WSM-P Workflow Semantic Matching Platform] , PhD Thesis, Busines Computer Information System, University of Trier, Germany, 2008.

[4] Yuji Matsumoto, Hozumi Tanaka, Hideki Hirakawa, Hideo Miyoshi, and Hideki Yasukawa, BUP: a bottom-up parser embedded in Prolog. New Generation Computing, 1(2):145-158, 1983.

[5] Fawsy Bendeck, Automation of XML Documents Translators Generation. In 10th IEEE, International Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises (WETICE 2001), Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), June 2001.

[6] M.M. Richter, Knowledge Management - Process Modeling, Lecture Notes, Calgary University 2004.

[7] Petri, Charles, Pragmatic semantic unification, Internet Computing, IEEE Volume 9, Issue 5, Sept.-Oct. 2005 Page(s): 96 – 97, Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MIC.2005.107