Ontology Reconciliation

  • Adil Hameed
  • Alun Preece
  • Derek Sleeman
Chapter
Part of the International Handbooks on Information Systems book series (INFOSYS)

Summary

Ontologies are being applied very successfully in supporting information and knowledge exchange between people and organisations. However, for many reasons, different people and organisations will tend to use different ontologies. Therefore, in order to exchange information and knowledge, either everyone must adopt the same ontology — an unlikely scenario — or it must be possible to reconcile different ontologies. This chapter examines the issues and techniques in the reconciliation of ontologies. First, it examines the reasons why people and organisations will tend to use different ontologies, and why the pervasive adoption of common ontologies is unlikely. It then reviews alternative architectures for multiple-ontology systems on a large scale. A comparative analysis is provided of a number of frameworks which analyse types of mismatches between ontologies. The process of ontology reconciliation is outlined. Finally, some existing software tools that support reconciliation are surveyed, and areas are identified where further work is necessary.

Keywords

Merging Process Source Ontology Alternative Architecture Repertory Grid Technique Common Ontology 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004

Authors and Affiliations

  • Adil Hameed
    • 1
  • Alun Preece
    • 1
  • Derek Sleeman
    • 1
  1. 1.Department of Computing ScienceUniversity of AberdeenAberdeenUK

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