An Approach for Merging Domain Ontologies Using Semantic and Orphan Mapping Technique

摘要

Research on ontology merging has prompted numerous questions, such as, do existing studies consider domain semantics, do the constructs of different ontologies merge, and how can resultant ontologies be validated. We intend to devise an ontology-merging approach to answer these questions. We analyze the vocabulary of ontologies semantically and use the WordNet ontology for semantic orientation. The proposed approach presents ontology-merging algorithms whereby the concepts and properties in similar domain ontologies are mapped to merged ontology. In addition, the approach also performs orphan mappings to cover the unmapped vocabulary in ontologies. Our approach shows that the resultant ontology is error free, consistent, and mirrors the semantics of a domain completely. We conclude that addressing the semantic mapping of ontology vocabulary can achieve worthwhile improvements. Furthermore, we apply our methodology to the library domain and provide suggestions for future research.