DKP-OM : a semantic based ontology merger

Accurate mapping and merging of multiple ontologies to produce consistent and coherent merged global ontology is a very important process to enable heterogeneous multivendors semantic-based systems to communicate and understand each other. Current systems for ontology mapping and merging are very restricted in term of resolving mismatches or proposing accurate matches with no or minimum human intervention. The suggestions made by these systems do not consider all information available in the semantic knowledge of the ontologies. In this paper we are proposing a system for merging and alignment of OWL-DL ontologies that uses semantics of concepts especially the disjoint knowledge in order to resolve conflicts automatically. We show that in order to provide a complete, consistent and coherent merged ontology, preservation of disjoint knowledge in the definition of ontologies is very helpful. Our system uses heuristics-based approach for mapping concepts of ontologies by analyzing description logic (DL) of concepts and preserves the disjoint knowledge in the merged ontology, too. The concept of validation during the initial stages of ontology mapping not only distinguishes our system from the existing ones’ but also reduces the users’ dependability for validating the consistency of the generated mappings. We also discuss experimental findings to prove the effectiveness of our approach in merging process. -- Ontology mapping and merging ; disjoint knowledge preservation ; ontology engineering ; knowledge modelling ; semantic computing