Finding Equivalent Ontologies in Watson

We present an efficient mechanism for finding equivalent ontologies motivated by the development of the Semantic Web search engine Watson. In principle, it computes a canonical form for the ontologies, which can then be compared syntactically to assess semantic equivalence. The advantage of using this method is that the canonical form can be indexed by the search engine, reducing the search for equivalent ontologies to a usual text search operation using the canonical form. This method is therefore more suitable for a search engine like Watson than the naive comparison of all possible candidate pairs of ontologies using a reasoner.