Mapping Ontologies by Utilising Their Semantic Structure

Abstract

As a key factor to enable interoperability in the Semantic Web (Berners-Lee, Hendler & Lassila, 2001), ontologies are developed by different organisations at a large scale, also in overlapping areas. Therefore, ontology mapping has come into forth to achieve knowledge sharing and semantic integration in an environment where knowledge and information are represented by different underlying ontologies. The ontology mapping problem can be defined as acquiring the relationships that hold between the entities of two ontologies. Mapping results can be used for various purposes such as schema/ontology integration, information retrieval, query mediation, or web service mapping. In this article, a method to map concepts and properties between ontologies is presented. First, syntactic analysis is applied based on token strings, and then semantic analysis is executed according to WordNet (Fellbaum, 1999) and tree-like graphs representing the structures of ontologies. The experimental results exemplify that our algorithm finds mappings with high precision.