Dynamic ontology mapping for interacting autonomous systems

Abstract

With the emergence of mobile and ubiquitous computing environments, there is a requirement to enable collaborative applications between these environments. As many of these applications have been designed to operate in isolation, making them work together is often complicated by the semantic and ontological differences in the meta-data describing the data to be shared. Typical approaches to overcoming onto-logical differences require the presence of a third party administrator, an approach incompatible with autonomous systems. This paper presents an approach to automatic ontology mapping suitable for deployment in autonomous, interacting systems for a class of collaborative application. The approach facilitates the collaboration of application-level data collections by identifying areas of ontological conflict and using meta-data values associated with those collections to establish commonality. A music sharing application has been developed to facilitate the sharing of music between peers. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.