Creating a coherent set of ontologies to support a collaborative design process amongst different firms which develop mechatronic products is a challenge due to the semantic heterogeneity of the underlying domain models and the amount of domain knowledge that needs to be covered. We tackle the problem of semantic heterogeneity by employing the DOLCE foundational ontology and by aligning our models to it. We approach the problem of scale, i.e. the amount of knowledge modeled by keeping the models at a descriptive level which is still granular enough to connect them with domain and task specific engineering tools. In order to manage the complexity of the modeling task we separate the models into the foundational layer, the mechatronic layer consisting of three domain ontologies, one process model and one cross-domain model, and the collaborative application layer. For the development process, we employ a methodology for dynamic ontology creation, which moves from taxonomical structures to formal models.

Future information, knowledge and content infrastructures which provide highly automatic support in fulfilling users goals will most likely rely on some form of Grid computing. In combination with Semantic Web technologies and Semantic Web services, this infrastructure will be much enhanced to form the Semantic Grid. Last but not least, one of the major driving forces for the Web and its future derivatives is actual content which can range from multimedia data (with some meta data) to "intelligent objects" i.e. content that itself, can either exhibit behavior or at least, carry semantic information that can (and must) be interpreted by the services of the Semantic Grid. This paper proposes GRISINO, an integrated infrastructure for Semantic Web Services, Intelligent Content Objects and Grid that are brought together in the search for an emerging solution that cope with rapidly increasing demands and complexity of next generation distributed applications.

The authors demonstrate a prototype toolkit called ITSE (Integrated Translation Support Environment), for interoperation and migration of heterogeneous database systems.