Ontology merging: A practical perspective

Abstract

Digitization of data has now come in a big way in almost every possible aspects of modern life. Agriculture as a domain is no exception. But digitization alone does not suffice, efficient retrievability of the information has to be ensured for providing web services including question-answering. However, building an ontology for a vast domain as a whole is not straightforward. We view creation of an ontology as an incremental process, where small-scale ontologies for different sub-domains are expected to be developed independently, to be merged into a single ontology for the domain. The paper aims at designing a framework for ontology merging. The method is described with agriculture as the primary domain with several subdomains such as crop, fertilizer, as subdomains among others. The supremacy of the scheme over Protégé, a well-known ontology management software is demonstrated.