Effective communication between autonomous knowledge systems is dependent on the correct interpretation of exchanged messages, based on the entities (or vocabulary) within the messages, and their ontological definitions. However, as such systems cannot be assumed to share the same ontologies, a mechanism for autonomously determining a mutually acceptable alignment between the ontologies is required. Furthermore, the ontologies themselves may be confidential or commercially sensitive, and thus neither systems may be willing to expose their full ontologies to other parties (this may be pertinent as the transaction may only relate to part, and not all of the ontology). In this paper, we present a novel inquiry dialogue that allows such autonomous systems, or agents to assert, counter, accept and reject correspondences. It assumes that agents have acquired a variety of correspondences from past encounters, or from publicly available alignment systems, and that such knowledge is asymmetric and incomplete (i.e. not all agents may be aware of some correspondences, and their associated utility can vary greatly). By strategically selecting the order in which correspondences are disclosed, the two agents can jointly construct a bespoke alignment whilst minimising the disclosure of private knowledge. We show how partial alignments, garnered from different alignment systems, can be reused and aggregated through our dialectical approach, and illustrate how solutions to the Stable Marriage problem can be used to eliminate ambiguities (i.e. when an entity in one ontology is mapped to several other entities in another ontology). We empirically evaluate the performance of the resulting alignment compared to the use of randomly selected alignment systems, and show how by adopting a sceptical mentalistic attitude, an agent can further reduce the necessary disclosure of ontological knowledge.
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