An ontology architecture for integration of ontologies

Abstract

Ontologies are expected in various areas as promising tools to improve communication among people and to achieve interoperability among systems. For communications between different business domains, building an ontology through integrating existing ontologies is more efficient way than building the ontology without them. However, integration of ontologies is very struggling work since languages, domains, and structures of ontologies are different from each other. In this paper, we suggest an Ontology Architecture which solves this problem by providing a systematic framework to classify ontologies from three kinds of viewpoints: language, domain range, constructs. The Ontology Architecture consists of three axes according to the three viewpoints: Ontology Meta Layering axis, Semantic Domain Layering axis, and Ontology Constructs Layering axis. Because three axes in the Ontology Architecture are designed to improve the syntactic and semantic interoperability among ontologies, the integration of ontologies can be readily achieved. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.