Картография Онтологии: Государство Искусства

Ontology Mapping: The State of the Art

Abstract. Ontology mapping is seen as a solution provider in today’s landscape of ontology research. As the number of ontologies that are made publicly available and accessible on the Web increases steadily, so does the need for applications to use them. A single ontology is no longer enough to support the tasks envisaged by a distributed environment like the Semantic Web. Multiple ontologies need to be accessed from several applications. Mapping could provide a common layer from which several ontologies could be accessed and hence could exchange information in semantically sound manners. Developing such mappings has been the focus of a variety of works originating from diverse communities over a number of years. In this article we comprehensively review and present these works. We also provide insights on the pragmatics of ontology mapping and elaborate on a theoretical approach for defining ontology mapping.

1 Introduction

Nowadays, the interested practitioner in ontology mapping, is often faced with a knotty problem: there is an enormous amount of diverse work originating from different communities who claim some sort of relevance to ontology mapping. For example, terms and works encountered in the literature which claimed to be relevant include: alignment, merging, articulation, fusion, integration, morphism, and so on. Given this diversity, it is difficult to identify the problem areas and comprehend solutions provided. Part of the problem is the lack of a comprehensivesurvey, a standard terminology, hidden assumptions or undisclosed technical details, and the dearth of evaluation metrics.

This article aims to fill-in some of these gaps, primarily the first one: lack of a comprehensive survey. We scrutinised the literature and critically reviewed works originating from a variety of fields to provide a comprehensive overview of ontology mapping work to date. We also worked on the theoretical grounds for

defining ontology mapping, which could act as the glue for better understanding similarities and pinpointing differences in the works reported.