A Novel Approach in Ontology Mapping

Abstract

The World Wide Web is now widely used as a universal medium for information exchange but the application of WWW is limited due to information heterogeneity and non semantic nature of HTML. The vision of semantic web provides many new technologies to overcome the limitation of WWW. In advent of the Semantic Web and recent standardization efforts, Ontology has quickly become a popular and core semantic technology. Ontology is seen as a solution provider to knowledge based systems. It facilitates tasks such as knowledge sharing, reuse and intelligent processing by computer agents. A key problem addressed by Ontology is the semantic interoperability problem. Interoperability in general is a common problem in different domain applications and semantic interoperability is the hardest and an ongoing research problem. It is required for systems to exchange knowledge and having the meaning of the knowledge accurately and automatically interpreted by the receiving systems. While Ontology promotes semantic interoperability across systems by unifying their knowledge bases through consensual understanding, common engineering and processing practices, it does not solve the semantic interoperability problem at the global level. Ontology mapping is a mechanism for providing semantic bridges between Ontologies. While Ontology Mapping promotes semantic interoperability across Ontologies, it is seen as the solution provider to the global semantic interoperability problem. Different applications would require different mapping techniques. This thesis analyzes the relations between Ontology, semantic interoperability and Ontology Mapping. An Ontology-based semantic interoperability solution has been developed.