A Conflict-Based Operator for Mapping Revision Theory and Implementation

摘要

Ontology matching is one of the key research topics in the field of the Semantic Web. There are many matching systems that generate mappings between different ontologies either automatically or semi-automatically. However, the mappings generated by these systems may be inconsistent with the ontologies. Several approaches have been proposed to deal with the inconsistencies between mappings and ontologies. This problem is often called a mapping revision problem, as the ontologies are assumed to be correct, whereas the mappings are repaired when resolving the inconsistencies. In this paper, we first propose a conflict-based mapping revision operator and show that it can be characterized by two logical postulates adapted from some existing postulates for belief base revision. We then provide an algorithm for iterative mapping revision by using an ontology revision operator and show that this algorithm defines a conflict-based mapping revision operator. Three concrete ontology revision operators are given to instantiate the iterative algorithm, which result in three different mapping revision algorithms. We implement these algorithms and provide some preliminary but interesting evaluation results.