Arguing Over Ontology Alignments

In open and dynamic environments, agents will usually differ in the domain ontologies they commit to and their perception of the world. The availability of Alignment Services, that are able to provide correspondences between two ontologies, is only a partial solution to achieving interoperability between agents, because any given candidate set of alignments is only suitable in certain contexts. For a given context, different agents might have different and inconsistent perspectives that reflect their differing interests and preferences on the acceptability of candidate mappings, each of which may be rationally acceptable. In this paper we introduce an argumentation-based negotiation framework over the terminology they use in order to communicate. This argumentation framework relies on a formal argument manipulation schema and on an encoding of the agents preferences between particular kinds of arguments. The former does not vary between agents, whereas the latter depends on the interests of each agent. Thus, this approach distinguishes clearly between the alignment rationales valid for all agents and those specific to a particular agent.