Towards a formalization of ontology relations in the context of ontology repositories

Abstract

In the context of Semantic Web Search Engines is becoming crucial to study relations between ontologies to improve the ontology selection task. In this paper, we describe DOOR - The Descriptive Ontology of Ontology Relations, to represent, manipulate and reason upon relations between ontologies in large ontology repositories. DOOR represents a first attempt in describing and formalizing ontology relations. In fact, it does not pretend to be a universal standard structure. Rather, It is intended to be a flexible, easily modifiable structure to model ontology relations in the context of ontology repositories. Here, we provide a detailed description of the methodology used to design the DOOR ontology, as well as an overview of its content. We also describe how DOOR is used in a complete framework (called KANNEL) for detecting and managing semantic relations between ontologies in large ontology repositories. Applied in the context of a large collection of automatically crawled ontologies, DOOR and KANNEL provide a starting point for analyzing the underlying structure of the network of ontologies that is the Semantic Web. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.