A philosophy-driven entity classification and enrichment for ontology mapping

Abstract

Ontologies are intended to facilitate semantic interoperability among distributed and intelligent information systems. Because of the distributed nature of the World Wide Web, Web ontologies have been developing in multiple forms of heterogeneity. For interoperating among information systems through heterogeneous ontologies, ontology mapping is a prerequisite process to generate alignment between two ontologies. In order to improve alignment accuracy, our approach is to clarify and enrich the semantics of ontological entities before mapping. For this purpose, we present a semi-automatic framework of entity classification and enrichment by applying three philosophical notions: identity condition, existential rigidity, and external dependency. Our objective is to supply a set of philosophy-driven anchors into ontologies for their mapping process by using a sortal taxonomy as a background knowledge model. © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.