CATO - A Lightweight Ontology Alignment Tool

Ontologies are becoming increasingly common in the World Wide Web as the building block for a future Semantic Web. In this Web, ontologies will be responsible for making the semantics of pages and applications explicit, thus allowing electronic agents to process and integrate resources automatically. With the widespread, distributed use of ontologies, different parties will inevitably develop ontologies with overlapping content. The ability to integrate different ontologies meaningfully is thus critical to assure coordinated action in multi agent systems. In this paper, we propose a strategy and tool that allow for totally automatic ontology alignment for the Semantic Web. We subscribe to the view that software agents must act autonomously and should not count on user intervention of any kind. Therefore, our approach to ontology alignment, as opposed to related work that uses semi-automatic or even manual techniques, is to provide CATO, a fast, reliable, user independent tool that allows for autonomous on-line ontology alignment. CATO is publicly available in the Internet and works for any pair of OWL compliant ontologies.