ONTOLOGY MATCHING FOR COLLABORATIVE ENGINEERING

摘要

Collaborative Engineering is a knowledge and communication intensive process which requires a common communication language agents can read and understand. Ontology, defined as a shared description of concepts and relationships of a domain expressed in a computer readable language, has appeared as a promising solution to this problem. But, using the same ontology is not a realistic solution since communities of practice use their own ontologies. These ontologies are generally not interoperable. Ontology matching has become the new challenge in collaborative engineering. Nevertheless, if many solutions of matching ontologies exist, there is still no solution that is a clear success. Matching ontologies remains difficult. The main reason lies in ambiguity in semantic interpretation of concepts. After a state of art of ontology matching, this article presents a semantic matching method based on "specific differences" between concepts.