Abstract FR:

Application integration is a process of bringing of data or functionality from one program together with that from another application programs that were not initially created to work together. Recently, the integration of numerical simulation solvers gained the importance. Integration within this domain has high complexity due to the presence of non-standard application interfaces that exchange complex, diverse and often ambiguous data. Nowadays, the integration is done mostly manually. Difficulties of the manual process force to increase the level of automation of the integration process. The author of this dissertation created a methodology and its software implementation for semi-automated (i. E. Partially automated) application integration. Application interfaces are usually represented by their syntactical definitions, but they miss the high-level semantics of applicative domains - human understanding on what the software does. The author proposes to use formal specifications (ontologies) expressed in Description Logics in order to specify software interfaces and define their high-level semantics. The author proposes a three-tier informational model for structuring ontologies and the integration process. This model distinguishes among computation-indeoendent domain knowledge (domain ontology), platform-independent interface specifications (interface ontology) and platform-specific technological integration information (technological ontology). A mediation ontology is defined to fuse the specifications. A reasoning procedure over these ontologies searches for semantic links among syntactic definitions of application interfaces. Connectors among applications are generated using the information about semantic links. Integrated applications communicate later via the connectors. The author designed a meta-model based data manipulation approach that facilitates and supports the software implementation of the integration process.