Matching domain and top-level ontologies via OntoWordNet

Matching domain and top-level ontologies is an important task but still an open problem in the ontology matching field. The main difficulties are particularly due to their different levels of abstraction. In this paper, we propose an approach that exploits existing alignments between WordNet and top-level ontologies, as an intermediate layer, and that relies on the notion of context of concepts [1,3,5]. Contexts are constructed from all information about an ontology entity (e.g., entity naming, annotation properties and information on the neighbors of entities) and are used for disambiguating the senses that better express the meaning of ontology entities in WordNet. After selecting an appropriated synset for a given domain ontology, we verify if there is a relation between that synset and a top-level concept, via existing alignments between WordNet and the top-level ontology. Here, we focus on DOLCE top-level ontology and OntoWordNet [2]. This choice is motivated by the fact that DOLCE is one of the most used top-level ontologies and serves as a reference for the modeling and integration of ontologies [4].