Semantic Mediation: a literature review on semantic interoperability through ontologies

Organisations operate in increasingly complex and dynamic environments where different Information Systems (IS) must interact efficiently and quickly. The diversity of meanings or interpretations of data in different contexts present in these IS raises problems of semantic heterogeneity, an obstacle to their integration and synchronisation. Through Semantic Mediation, it is possible to achieve the goal of Semantic Interoperability, where different informatic systems can interact and understand each other’s data in an efficient and meaningful way. This can help solve the problem of semantic heterogeneity, using a common ontology for the syntactic and semantic representation of information, and creating a semantic mediator. This study presents a systematic review of the literature on the use of ontologies to achieve semantic interoperability between informatic systems in order to determine the relevance of the Semantic Mediation Model. Databases containing articles published between 2013 and September 2024 were searched. The use of ontologies to facilitate semantic interoperability was present in 66% of the articles in this review. The most important research contexts and relevant case studies were then identified. These case study articles will be included in future research.