Semantic Coordination: A New Approach and an Application

Semantic coordination, namely the problem of finding an agreement on the meaning of heterogeneous semantic models, is one of the key issues in the development of the Semantic Web. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for discovering semantic mappings across hierarchical classifications based on a new approach to semantic coordination. This approach shifts the problem of semantic coordination from the problem of computing linguistic or structural similarities (what most other proposed approaches do) to the problem of deducing relations between sets of logical formulae that represent the meaning of concepts belonging to different models. We show how to apply the approach and the algorithm to an interesting family of semantic models, namely hierarchical classifications, and present the results of preliminary tests on two types of hierarchical classifications, web directories and catalogs. Finally, we argue why this is a significant improvement on previous approaches.