Semantic distance measure between ontology concept's attributes

Abstract

In this paper we present our work on ontology alignment. Careful literature research has brought us to the point where we have noticed vaguenesses of previously developed approaches. The basic problem is lack of interest in elementary building blocks of ontological concepts, which are concepts' attributes. In our work we concentrate on defining these atomic elements and analyzing how their characteristics can influence the whole process of aligning ontologies. We claim that expanding attributes with explicit semantics increases reliability of finding mappings between ontologies - designating partial alignments between concepts built around mapping their structures treated as a combination of attributes and their semantics can improve the amount of information that can be transformed thanks with found mappings. We believe that our approach moves the focus from aligning simple labels of concepts to aligning information about the real world they express. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.