Ontology mapping specification in description logics for cooperative systems

Overview & Synopsis

The rapid development of the semantic Web is associated with the specification of various ontologies which formally represent agreements of communities of people on specific domains or tasks. The same knowledge formalized by different people leads to heterogeneous representations. Cooperative systems, which aim to make knowledge from various sources available in spite of their heterogeneities, need to align, merge or integrate the ontologies used to model the information sources. Furthermore, the resolution of differences among ontologies is necessary to process queries or use web services in distributed heterogeneous environments. Mapping discovery is a key issue to allow efficient resolution of heterogeneity. We develop an architecture for mapping different systems associated with ontologies. In this paper we present the key components and the underlying concepts of a framework and approach for comparing and matching different ontologies.