基于本体的语义信息集成能够解决分布环境下异构数据源之间的模式异构，而对于广泛存在的上下文异构却无法解决。由于上下文异构是暗含的语义，无法为信息系统俘获和理解，要解决上下文异构，必须将上下文语义进行形式化描述。本文首先提出了一种将暗含的上下文语义进行形式化描述的方法，然后在此基础上提出了一种基于元数据格式表示的上下文转换方法来解决上下文异构中的格式异构。该方法避免了已有转换方法需要反复定义大量映射的缺点，提高了上下文转换的灵活性、适应性和扩展性。

Ontology based semantic information integration can solve the schematic heterogeneity among distributed data sources, but can not solve context heterogeneity which widely exists. Because context semantics is implicit which can not be captured and understood by information integration systems. To solve context heterogeneity, firstly a formal context presentation to describe the implicit semantics formally is introduced. Then, a flexible, adaptive and scalable context conversion method based on the format’s metadata representation is proposed to resolve format heterogeneity, which is one of the context heterogeneities. This method avoids the shortcomings of the existing methods which need to define numerous mappings repeatedly.