Ontology Mapping and Merging Aspects in Semantic Web

Let us assume there are two ontologies-each consisting of set of entities having classes, properties and instances and user wants to associate semantic relationships among entity components. According to [1], the process of identifying semantic independences among entity components is termed as Ontology Mapping. Mapping has been applied variedly by several researchers in context of ontology related studies [2]. Ontologies can be integrated, unified, merged and mapped to derive new set of relationships from existing ones. In [1,2], mapping is defined as set of formulae that consists of correlation coefficients to achieve semantic relationships among classes, properties and instances. In [3], mapping is viewed as a process of maintaining correspondences among given ontologies and deriving similar concepts from them. The concepts may have different names but they point towards the same meaning [4-6]. Varied techniques for ontology merging and alignment have also been suggested by several researchers [7-9]. Merging of ontologies refers to generation of single independent logical ontology from given set of data sources while alignment of ontologies helps in achieving consistent ontologies. [5], defines ontology mapping as a component that is responsible for providing mapping services so that concepts of ontology related to query can be mapped onto second ontology. This mapping service can be deployed in various applications that can be used for integration of ontologies [7-9].