Context - Sensitive Ontology Matching in Electronic Business

In today’s global economy, electronic business has offered great advantages to enhance the capabilities of traditional businesses. In order to satisfy the imposed requirement for businesses to coordinate with each other, electronic business partners are chosen to be represented by service agents. These agents need to understand each others’ service descriptions before successful coordination happens. Ontologies developed by service providers to describe their service can render help in this regard. Unfortunately, due to the heterogeneity implicit in independently designed ontologies, distributed agents are bound to face semantic mismatches and/or misunderstandings. We introduce an innovative algorithm, Context-Sensitive Matching, to reconcile heterogeneous ontologies. Our algorithm takes into consideration contextual information, via inference through a formal, robust statistical model based on confidence interval. In addition, an Artificial Neural Network is utilized to learning weights for different semantic aspects. At last, an agglomerative clustering algorithm is adopted to generate the final matching results. INTRODUCTION A wide range of online business activities for products and/or services are referred to as electronic business, which is increasingly being utilized by many different types of enterprises due to its potential to provide new opportunities and unparalleled efficiencies. In most cases electronic business is associated with buying and selling over the Internet, or conducting transactions involving the transfer of ownership or rights to use goods or services through a computer-mediated network. Broadly speaking, electronic business can be regarded as any business process that relies on an automated information system, which typically incorporates Web-based technologies. Thus, electronic business enables companies to link their internal and external data processing systems in a more efficient, effective, and flexible way. As a result, such companies will be more agile and responsive to their customers. Because of the fact that electronic business is usually conducted using the dynamic environment of the Internet and the World-Wide Web, it is advantageous to introduce software agents into the electronic business area. Considering the two fundamental characteristics of software agents, i.e.,