A Philosophical Foundation for Ontology Alignments – The Structuralistic Approach

摘要

Together with formal ontologies, ontology alignments are utilized to interconnect distributed information systems. Despite their widespread use, it is not trivial to specify a formal semantics for ontology alignments-due to the disparity of the respective domains of the involved ontologies. There are already approaches to tackle this problem, but each is relying on different presumptions. In this paper we propose an interpretation of alignments in terms of theories as they are understood in the philosophy of science following the structuralistic notion of ontological reduction. We use this framework to identify an account of the necessary presumptions of every alignment semantics. These assumptions are then used as a basis for the comparison of existing alignment semantics.