Establishing global ontology by matching and merging

Abstract

Ontology is used for communication between people and organizations by providing a common terminology over a domain. This work presents a system of establishing global ontology from existing ontologies. Establishing ontology from scratch is hard and expensive. This work establishes ontology by matching and merging existing ontologies. Ontologies can be matched and merged to produce a single integrated ontology. Integrated ontology has consistent and coherent information rather than using multiple ontologies, which may be heterogeneous and inconsistent. Heterogeneity between different ontologies in the same domain is the primary obstacle for interoperation between systems. Heterogeneity leads to the absence of a standard terminology for any given domain that may cause problems when an agent, service, or application uses information from two different ontologies. Integrating ontologies is a very important process to enable applications, agents and services to communicate and understand each other. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.