Ontology merging
Encyclopedia
Ontology merging defines the act of bringing together two conceptually divergent ontologies
or the instance data associated to two ontologies. This is similar to work in database merging (schema matching
). This merging process can be performed in a number of ways, manually, semi automatically, or automatically. Manual ontology merging although ideal is extremely labour intensive and current research attempts to find semi or entirely automated techniques to merge ontologies. These techniques are statistically driven often taking into account similarity of concepts and raw similarity of instances through textual string metrics and semantic knowledge. These techniques are similar to those used in information integration
employing string metrics from open source
similarity libraries such as SimMetrics
.
Ontology (computer science)
In computer science and information science, an ontology formally represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and the relationships between those concepts. It can be used to reason about the entities within that domain and may be used to describe the domain.In theory, an ontology is...
or the instance data associated to two ontologies. This is similar to work in database merging (schema matching
Schema matching
The terms schema matching and mapping are often used interchangeably. For this article, we differentiate the two as follows: Schema matching is the process of identifying that two objects are semantically related while mapping refers to the transformations between the objects...
). This merging process can be performed in a number of ways, manually, semi automatically, or automatically. Manual ontology merging although ideal is extremely labour intensive and current research attempts to find semi or entirely automated techniques to merge ontologies. These techniques are statistically driven often taking into account similarity of concepts and raw similarity of instances through textual string metrics and semantic knowledge. These techniques are similar to those used in information integration
Information integration
Information integration is the merging of information from disparate sources with differing conceptual, contextual and typographical representations. It is used in data mining and consolidation of data from unstructured or semi-structured resources...
employing string metrics from open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
similarity libraries such as SimMetrics
SimMetrics
SimMetrics is an open source extensible library of algorithms for calculating string metrics - measures of similarity or dissimilarity between two text strings...
.