A Language and Algorithm for Automatic Merging of Ontologies

Abstract

Ontologies are becoming important repositories of information useful for business transactions and operations since they are amenable to knowledge processing using artificial intelligence techniques. They offer the potential of amassing large contents of relevant information, but until now the fusion or merging of ontologies, needed for knowledge buildup and its exploitation by machine, was done manually or through computer-aided ontology editors. Thus, attaining large ontologies was expensive and slow. This chapter offers a new, automatic method of joining two ontologies to obtain a third one. The method works well in spite of inconsistencies, redundancies, and different granularity of information.