Discovering Mappings Between Ontologies

Abstract

Knowledge Representation is important part of AI. The purpose is to reveal best possible representation of the Universe of Discourse (UoD) by capturing entities, concepts and relations among them. With increased understanding of various scientific and technological disciplines, it is possible to derive rules that governs the behaviour and outcome of the entities in the UoD. In certain cases, it is not possible to establish any explicit rule, yet through experience or observation, some experts can define rules from their tacit knowledge in specific domain. Knowledge representation techniques are focused on techniques that allows externalization of implicit and explicit knowledge of expert(s) with a goal of reuse in absence of physical presence of such expertise. To ease this task, two parallel dimensions have developed over period of time. One dimension is focused on investigating more efficient methods that best suit the knowledge representation requirement resulting in theories and tools that allows capturing the domain knowledge (Brachman & Levesque, 2004). Another development has taken place in harmonization of tools and techniques that allows standard based representation of knowledge (Davies, Studer, & Warren, 2006). Various languages are proposed for representation of the knowledge. Reasoning and classification algorithms are also realized. As an outcome of standardization process, standards like DAML-OIL (Horrocks & PatelSchneider, 2001), RDF (Manola & Miller, 2004) and OWL(Antoniou & Harmelen, 2004) are introduced. Capturing the benefit of both developments, the tooling is also came in to existence that allows creation of knowledgebase. As a result of these developments, the amount of publicly shared knowledge is continuously increasing. At the time of this writing, a search engine like Swoogle (Ding et al., 2004)-developed to index publicly available Ontologies, is handling over 2,173,724 semantic web documents containing 431,467,096 triples. While the developments are yielding positive results by such a huge amount of knowledge available for reuse, it have become difficult to select and reuse required knowledge from this vast pool. The concepts and their relations that are important to the given problem could have already been defined in multiple Ontologies with different perspectives with specific level of details. It is very likely that to get complete representation of the knowledge, multiple Ontologies must be utilized. This requirement has introduced a new discipline within the domain of knowledge representation that is focused on investigation of techniques and tools that allows integration of multiple shared Ontologies.