Dealing with Semantic Heterogeneity Issues on the Web

The Semantic Web is an extension of the traditional Web in which meaning of information is well defined, thusallowing a better interaction between people and computers. To accomplish its goals, mechanisms are required tomake explicit the semantics of Web resources, to be automatically processed by software agents (this semantics beingdescribed by means of online ontologies). Nevertheless, issues arise caused by the semantic heterogeneity thatnaturally happens on the Web, namely redundancy and ambiguity. For tackling these issues, we present an approachto discover and represent, in a non-redundant way, the intended meaning of words in Web applications, while takinginto account the (often unstructured) context in which they appear. To that end, we have developed novel ontologymatching, clustering, and disambiguation techniques. Our work is intended to help bridge the gap between syntax andsemantics for the Semantic Web construction. KEYWORDSSemantic Web, semantic heterogeneity, ontology matching, disambiguation CONTACT INFORMATIONJorge GraciaEmail:[email protected],Affiliation: Ontology Engineering Group, Universidad Politécnica de MadridAddress: Campus de Montegancedo sn, Boadilla del Monte 28660 Madrid, SpainPhone: +34 913363672Fax: +34 913524819 Eduardo MenaEmail: [email protected]: IIS Department, University of ZaragozaAddress: Edificio Ada Byron, María de Luna 1, 50018 Zaragoza, SpainPhone: +34 976762340Fax: +34 976761914 SHORT BIOSJorge Gracia is a postdoctoral researcher in the Artificial Intelligence Department of Universidad Politécnica deMadrid, Spain. His research interests include ontology matching, semantic disambiguation, semantic measures, andmultilingualism in the field of the Semantic Web. He obtained his PhD in computer science at University of Zaragoza.Contact him at [email protected] Mena is an Associate Professor at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. He leads the Distributed InformationSystems research group at his university. His research interest areas include interoperable, heterogeneous anddistributed information systems, Semantic Web, and mobile computing. He received his Ph.D. degree in ComputerScience from the University of Zaragoza. Contact him at [email protected]