Will My Ontologies Fit Together? A preliminary investigation. (original) (raw)
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Will my Ontologies Fit Together? Technical Report
In realistic applications, it is often desirable to integrate different ontologies 1 into a single, reconciled ontology. Ideally, one would expect the individual ontologies to be developed as independently as possible from the rest, and the final reconciliation to be seamless and free from unexpected results. This would allow for the modular design of large ontologies and would facilitate knowledge reuse tasks. Few ontology development tools, however, provide any support for integration, and there has been relatively little study of the problem at a fundamental level.
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Ontologies allow the abstract conceptualisation of domains, but a given domain can be conceptualised through many different ontologies, which can be problematic when ontologies are used to support knowledge sharing. We present a formal account of ontologies that is intended to support knowledge sharing through precise characterisations of relationships such as compatibility and refinement. We take an algebraic approach, in which ontologies are presented as logical theories.
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Modularity is a key requirement for collaborative ontology engineering and for distributed ontology reuse on the Web. Modern ontology languages, such as OWL, are logic-based, and thus a useful notion of modularity needs to take the semantics of ontologies and their implications into account. We propose a logic-based notion of modularity that allows the modeler to specify the external signature of their ontology, whose symbols are assumed to be defined in some other ontology. We define two restrictions on the usage of the external signature, a syntactic and a slightly less restrictive, semantic one, each of which is decidable and guarantees a certain kind of "black-box" behavior, which enables the controlled merging of ontologies. Analysis of real-world ontologies suggests that these restrictions are not too onerous.
Will My Ontologies Fit Together?
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The workshop continues the long-standing tradition of international workshops devoted to discussing developments and applications of knowledge representation formalisms and systems based on Description Logics. The list of the International Workshops on Description Logics can be found at http://dl.kr.org.
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Abstract Integration as the process of building an ontology reusing other ontologies which are parts of the resulting ontology has already been acknowledged as an essential process in building ontologies. Unfortunately little work has been done in this area. In this article we characterize the integration process, we provide some guidelines to that process, and we present a living classification of integration operations.
The purpose of this document is to identify requirements that are too general to result from any single use case area, cut across all use cases areas, or are not directly related to the existing use cases, but nonetheless important. ... The following requirements are recommended by the group. ... Ontologies are publicly available and different data sources can commit to the same ontology for shared meaning. ... Any use case in which distributed data sources use shared terminology. ... Interoperability requires agreements on the definitions of terms. ...
Some theoretical considerations on integration of ontologies
1998
Abstract In this paper, we discuss integration of multiple ontologies in a formal way. First, we formalize ontology as combination of logical theories with modality. We introduce two types of integration. Combination aspect connects heterogeneous aspects in which aspect theories are simply merged. On the other hand, category aspect connects homogeneous aspects in which aspect theories are connected with possibility modality.