Multiple viewpoints based ontology integration

Abstract

Ontology integration is a focus on ontology application field. Ontology can be viewed as a kind of software product. Ontology integration needs to be directed by methodology. In many applications, we need to integrate existed ontologies for a unified ontology for application requirements. The ontology to be integrated can be viewed as a viewpoint of the unified ontology. A multiple-viewpoints-based ontology integration approach is introduced by multiple viewpoints theory in requirement engineering. We define ontology viewpoint by characters of ontology and use conceptual graph to represent semantic in ontology. We discuss the inconsistency checking inner ontology viewpoint and among ontology viewpoints. At last, we use a concept lattice to construct the concept hierarchy. © Springer-Verlag 2004.