Merging expressive ontologies using formal concept analysis

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a solution to the problem of merging ontologies when instances associated to two source ontologies are available. The solution we propose is based on Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) and considers that ontologies are formalized in expressive Description Logics. Our approach creates a merged ontology which captures the knowledge of the two source ontologies. Contributions of this work are (i) enabling the creation of concepts not originally in the source ontologies, (ii) providing a definition to these concepts in terms of elements of both ontologies and (iii) optimizing the merged ontology. We have studied our approach in the context of spatial information, a domain which exploits many existing ontologies represented with Description Logics. © Springer-Verlag 2009.