Semantic integration has become a much-debated topic and it is viewed as a solution provider in both industrial and academic settings. As systems become more distributed and disparate within and across organisational boundaries and market segments, there is a need to preserve the meaning of concepts used in everyday transactions of information sharing. The emergence of the Semantic Web, and its anticipated industrial uptake in the years to come, has made these transactions, arguably, easier to implement and deploy on a large scale in a distributed environment like the Internet. However, at the same time it poses some interesting challenges. For instance, we observe that the demand for knowledge sharing has outstripped the current supply. Moreover, even when knowledge sharing is feasible, this is only within the boundaries of a specific system, when certain assumptions hold, and within a specific domain. The reason for this shortcoming is, probably, the very environment and technologies that created a high demand for sharing: the more ontologies are being deployed on the Semantic Web, the higher the demand to share them for the benefits of knowledge sharing to achieve semantic integration.
CROSI, which stands for (C)apturing, (R)epresenting, and (O)perationalising (S)emantic (I)ntegration aims to overcome these problems by working on a systematic approach to semantic integration which will enable us to: (a) capture and expose semantics, (b) codify them in knowledge representation formats, and (c) operationalise them for the benefit of integration. Our experience in this area draws upon existing and ongoing work under the AKT project in the area of ontology mapping.