The HCONE Approach to Ontology Merging

Existing efforts on ontology mapping, alignment and merging vary from methodological and theoretical frameworks, to methods and tools that support the semi-automatic coordination of ontologies. However, only latest research efforts “touch” on the mapping /merging of ontologies using the whole breadth of available knowledge. This paper aims to thoroughly describe the HCONE approach on ontology merging. The approach described is based on (a) capturing the intended informal interpretations of concepts by mapping them to WordNet senses using lexical semantic indexing, and (b) exploiting the formal semantics of concepts’ definitions by means of description logics’ reasoning services.