A Layered approach for Similarity Measurement between Ontologies

With the vision of Semantic Web, the ontology operations such as aligning, merging and mapping have gained much importance. The measuring of similarity between concepts of source ontologies is preprocessing of all these operations. Several techniques have been proposed for measuring similarity between concepts based on their lexical, taxonomic and elementary characteristics but a very little attention has been given on their non-taxonomic relations. We have observed that lexically similarity between concepts is mandatory in order to their taxonomic similarity. Furthermore, the taxonomic similarity between two concepts is pre-requisite of their non-taxonomic similarity. This motivates that if the similarity measurement process is made in layered fashion then it will become more efficient. In this paper, a new technique is proposed that includes non-taxonomic relations of concepts along with their lexical and taxonomic characteristics while measuring their similarities. The proposed technique works in a layered fashion that enables the measuring process more efficient. [Journal of American Science. 2010;6(12):6977]. (ISSN: 1545-1003).