An FCA-based Solution for Ontology Mediation

Abstract

In this paper, we present an ontology mediation solution based on the methods frequently used in Formal Concept Analysis. Our approach of mediation means that, if we can rely on the existence of instances associated to two source ontologies, then we can generate concepts in a new ontology if and only if they share the same extent. Hence our approach creates a merged ontology which captures the knowledge of the two source ontologies. The main contributions of this work are (i) to enable the creation of concepts not originally in the source ontologies, (ii) to propose a solution to label these new emerging concepts and finally (iii) to optimize the resulting ontology by eliminating redundant or non pertinent concepts. Another contribution of this work is to emphasize that several forms of mediated ontology can be defined based on the relaxation of certain criteria produced from our method. The solution that we propose for tackling these issues is an automatic solution, meaning that it does not require the intervention of the end-user, excepting for the definition of the common set of ontology instances.