A multi-strategy approach for ontology reuse through matching and integration techniques

Abstract

The new revolutionary web today, the Semantic Web, has augmented the previous one by promoting common data formats and exchange protocols in order to provide a framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. This revolution, together with the increasing digitization of the world, has led to a high availability of knowledge models, i.e., more or less formal representations of concepts underlying a certain universe of discourse, which span throughout a wide range of topics, fields of study and applications, mostly heterogeneous from each other at a different dimensions. As more and more outbreaks of this new revolution light up, a major challenge came soon into sight: addressing the main objectives of the semantic web, the sharing and reuse of data, demands effective and efficient methodologies to mediate between models speaking different languages. Since ontologies are the de facto standard in representing and sharing knowledge models over the web, this paper presents a comprehensive methodology to ontology integration and reuse based on various matching techniques. The approach proposed here is supported by an ad hoc software framework whose scope is easing the creation of new ontologies by promoting the reuse of existing ones and automatizing, as much as possible, the whole ontology construction procedure.