Ontology mediation

 
 

 

 
 

Jos de Bruijn, DERI, University of Innsbruck

With the advent of the Semantic Web, many ontologies are expected to be developed by many different persons and organizations. Because of the distributed and open nature of the Web, these ontologies can be expected to contain conflicts and semantic overlap; different ontologies would describe (parts of) the same domain in a different way, because of differences in the point of view of the different people who have developed the ontologies.

There are different aspects in the interoperability of applications on the Semantic Web. In order to achieve interoperability between applications, data needs to be exchanged. This data needs to be interpreted by the receiver in the way it was intended by the sender. Ontologies can help in the interpretation of data through formal and explicit representation of data, which can help machines to interpret data.

Having ontologies is not enough to achieve full interoperability between applications, because of the differences in the ontologies used by various applications. The interesting thing is that ontologies are described using a formal logical language. This enables relating different ontologies so that only knowledge about one ontology is required in order to be able to use different ontologies. The use of different ontologies and the reconciliation of differences between ontologies is called /ontology mediation/.

Ontology mediation is in fact concerned with making explicit the relationships between different ontologies in order for an application to use different ontologies, order rather, be able to interpret data that has been described in terms of an ontology which is not known to the application, but which has been formally related to an ontology which is known to the application.

SEKT will provide a practical language and practical tools for specifying the relations between different ontologies. Furthermore, SEKT will provide tools for using these relations and, more general, to use different (remote) ontologies from a specific Semantic Web application. In case mappings between ontologies are in place, mediation will be transparent and the application itself will not have to take care of the mediation; the semantic infrastructure will take care of integrating data from different semantically described sources.

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