Compatible and Incompatible Ontology Mappings

Upper ontologies are interesting because describing and representing concepts that can be used across various domains (as opposed to domain ontologies). This feature may enable increased correctness of mappings between domain ontologies, conceptual schema and languages. Unfortunately, there exist various upper ontologies and it is quite difficult to decide or to assess which of them should be used in one application: the main reason is that upper ontologies are complex artifacts possibly specified in specific logics providing formalization of highly abstract concepts. Researchers have been therefore interested in understanding the similarities between upper ontologies by establishing mappings between key ontology concepts. In this paper, we review mappings proposed in literature and we establish a notion of compatibility between these mappings by introducing a method based on Galois connections. We then conclude with a synthesis of the results obtained by using the proposed method. The key findings put in evidence some key differences leading to incompatibility among proposed mappings. These differences are worth to be further investigated.