Ontology Reconciliation

Ontologies are being applied very successfully in supporting information and knowledge exchange between people and organisations. However, for many reasons, different people and organisations will tend to use different ontologies. Therefore, in order to exchange information and knowledge, either everyone must adopt the same ontology — an unlikely scenario — or it must be possible to reconcile different ontologies. This chapter examines the issues and techniques in the reconciliation of ontologies. First, it examines the reasons why people and organisations will tend to use different ontologies, and why the pervasive adoption of common ontologies is unlikely. It then reviews alternative architectures for multipleontology systems on a large scale. A comparative analysis is provided of a number of frameworks which analyse types of mismatches between ontologies. The process of ontology reconciliation is outlined. Finally, some existing software tools that support reconciliation are surveyed, and areas are identified where further work is necessary.