Reconciling Agent Ontologies for Web Service Applications

Because there is still no agreed-upon global ontology, Web services supplied by different providers typically have individual and unique semantics, described by independently developed ontologies. The seamless connection of these distributed Web services for business-to-business applications depends heavily on reconciling the disparate semantics, possibly by integrating the ontologies. In this paper, we describe an approach to reconcile ontologies from distributed Web services. Our approach is totally automated, and features the following: i) alignment of the ontologies is performed without previous agreement on the semantics of the terminology in each ontology; ii) both linguistic and contextual features are considered; iii) the use of WordNet for linguistic analysis; iv) integration of heuristic knowledge for contextual analysis; and v) inference of new relationships by applying several rules based on domain-independent relationships and property lists. Experiments have been carried out to show the promising results of our system.