Modular Ontologies Composition: Levenshtein-Distance-Based Concepts Structure Comparison

This article describes how a modular ontology is a set of interconnected ontology modules. Modularity is a key requirement for collaborative ontology engineering and for distributed ontology reuse on the Web. Combining ontology modules in this context to get a global ontology is an important issue since it requires to resolves mismatches between the compared concepts. This article proposes a novel approach to automatically compose ontology modules. The proposed approach is based on concept structure comparison. The algorithm allowing to merge the ontology modules into a global ontology is detailed and similarity measures are explained. Similarity measures are computed against concept names, attributes and relationships. Experiments performed to test this algorithm are described and evaluation results are equally discussed.