Automatic fusion of knowledge stored in ontologies

摘要

A person adds new knowledge to his/her mind, taking into account new information, additional details, better precision, synonyms, homonyms, redundancies, apparent contradictions, and inconsistencies between what he/she knows and new knowledge that he/she acquires. This way, he/she incrementally acquires information keeping it at all times consistent. This information can be represented by Ontologies. In contrast to human approach, algorithms of Ontologies fusion lack these features, merely being computer-aided editors where a person solves the details and inconsistencies. This article presents a method for Ontology Merging (OM), its algorithm and implementation to fuse or join two ontologies (obtained from Web documents) in an automatic fashion (without human intervention), producing a third ontology, and taking into account the inconsistencies, contradictions, and redundancies between both ontologies, thus delivering a result close to reality. The repeated use of OM allows acquisition of much information about the same topic.