A New Approach for Formal and Coherent Ontology Alignment

Abstract

The ontology alignment process is a big challenge especially in open environments like the semantic web. In this process, the construction of the global ontology corresponds to the application of a succession of operations of change (add new mappings). This is obviously a critical task because the new implementation of changes can make the global ontology incoherent. Inevitably, some mappings will be a source of contradictions in terms of ontology. In order to handle these contradictions, the authors propose in this study a new formal solution based on CTL model checking for a consistent ontology alignment. This model uses the Kripke structure which satisfies the CTL logic formula to model the behaviors of the ontology of alignment. To test the functional utility of the proposed approach, they applied it to several examples and the results showed that the proposed framework is working correctly and that inconsistencies are detected in CTL models.