Abstract
Despite the intense research activity in the last two decades, ontology integration still presents a number of challenging issues. As ontologies are continuously growing in number, complexity and size and are adopted within open distributed systems such as the Semantic Web, integration becomes a central problem and has to be addressed in a context of increasing scale and heterogeneity. In this paper, we describe a holistic alignment-based method for customized ontology integration. The holistic approach proposes additional challenges as multiple ontologies are jointly integrated at once, in contrast to most common approaches that perform an incremental pairwise ontology integration. By applying consolidated techniques for ontology matching, we investigate the impact on the resulting ontology. The proposed method takes multiple ontologies as well as pairwise alignments and returns a refactored/non-refactored integrated ontology that faithfully preserves the original knowledge of the input ontologies and alignments. We have tested the method on large biomedical ontologies from the LargeBio OAEI track. Results show effectiveness, and overall, a decreased integration cost over multiple ontologies.•OIAR and AROM are two implementations of the proposed method.•OIAR creates a bridge ontology, and AROM creates a fully merged ontology.•The implementation includes the option of ontology refactoring.
Highlights
Ontology has become a more and more popular concept in Computer Science to represent and share knowledge within digital environments
Applications or information systems, relying on these ontologies, cannot achieve communication nor interoperability. Ontology integration addresses this issue by creating a new ontology that groups the knowledge contained in different existing ontologies and that can be used by different heterogeneous applications
The definition/description of the class ”Skin_of_head” in its original ontology and in the output integrated ontology can be expressed in Description Logics (DL) as follows: Definition of the "Skin_of_head" class in FMA: Skin_of_head Segment_of_skin in the bridge ontology: Skin_of_head Segment_of_skin Skin_of_head ≡ Head_Skin Skin_of_head ≡ Skin_structure_of_head In Appendix A, we provide definitions written in RDF/XML17 which is the standard format/syntax for expressing ontologies
Summary
Ontology has become a more and more popular concept in Computer Science to represent and share knowledge within digital environments. Ontology-based approaches have been adopted in the context of many domains, as well as across different domains according to a multi/trans-disciplinary philosophy. Due to this disconnected development of ontologies, many ontologies in identical, similar, complementary or interdisciplinary domains have been developed. Applications or information systems, relying on these ontologies, cannot achieve communication nor interoperability. Ontology integration addresses this issue by creating a new ontology that groups the knowledge contained in different existing ontologies and that can be used by different heterogeneous applications
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