Semantic bridging of independent enterprise ontologies

Abstract

Organizational knowledge typically comes from many independent sources, each with its own semantics. This paper describes a methodology by which information from large numbers of such sources can be associated, organized, and merged. The hypothesis is that a multiplicity of ontology fragments, representing the semantics of the independent sources, can be related to each other automatically without the use of a global ontology. That is, any pair of ontologies can be related indirectly through a semantic bridge consisting of many other previously unrelated ontologies, even when there is no way to determine a direct relationship between them. The relationships among the ontology fragments indicate the relationships among the sources, enabling the source information to be categorized and organized. A preliminary evaluation of the methodology has been conducted by relating 53 small, independently developed ontologies for a single domain. A nice feature of the methodology is that common parts of the ontologies reinforce each other, while unique parts are de-emphasized. The result is a consensus ontology. © 2003 by Springer Science+Business Media New York.