Will My Ontologies Fit Together? A preliminary investigation. (original) (raw)

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 allows for the modular design of large ontologies and facilitates knowledge reuse tasks. Few ontology development tools, however, provide any support for integration, and there has been relatively little study of these issues at a fundamental level. Understanding at this fundamental level would help us predict, for example, what logical consequences to expect from the integrated ontology, and whether the integration of ontologies preserves some desirable properties of its parts.