ONTOLOGY MERGING USING PROTÉGÉ – A CASE STUDY

Abstract

The exponential growth of data and the boom of online businesses necessitates the need for data to be machine-readable, as humans are no longer able to manually manage the vast amounts of data. Ontologies can define concepts and relations that are amenable to processing by machines. Ontologies are created in silos and pockets of domains, and the need to merge these resources is key to universal access to multi-domain knowledge. Merging of ontologies has been explored to an extent over the last two decades, and this paper explores the extent of the tools and techniques available with a case study of merging two ontologies which are publicly available, the Person ontology and Institutional ontology, using the latest tools available on the most popular ontology editor, Protégé. It is found that automated merging tools have not been improved much over the last two decades, and the most current merging tools provided combine the two ontologies into one but do not unite or merge any of the classes or axioms which are equivalent. This can be seen in the axiom count, which does not decrease in the merged ontology, showing that no similar classes or actual axioms were merged. Protégé plugins which used to provide the semi-automatic mapping of similar classes to assist the merging process were found to be no longer available, and manual mapping by the knowledge engineer was required. This supports further research in automated ontology merging techniques.