EnOntoModel: A semantically-enriched model for ontologies

Abstract

Ontologies are intended to facilitate semantic interoperability among distributed and intelligent information systems where diverse software components, computing devices, knowledge, and data, are involved. Since a single global ontology is no longer sufficient to support a variety of tasks performed on differently conceptualized knowledge, ontologies have proliferated in multiple forms of heterogeneity even for the same domain, and such ontologies are called heterogeneous ontologies. For interoperating among information systems through heterogeneous ontologies, an important step in handling semantic heterogeneity should be the attempt to enrich (and clarify) the semantics of concepts in ontologies. In this article, a conceptual model (called EnOntoModel) of semantically-enriched ontologies is proposed by applying three philosophical notions: identity, rigidity, and dependency. As for the advantages of EnOntoModel, the conceptual analysis of enriched ontologies and efficient matching between them are presented. Copyright © 2008, IGI Global.