A Framework for Managing Multiple Ontologies: The Function-Oriented Perspective

Ontologies are now ubiquitous in Semantic Web and knowledge representation areas. Managing multiple ontologies is a challenging issue including comparing existing ontologies, reusing ontologies, maintaining different versions, and so on. However, most previous multiple ontologies management work focused on ontologies maintenance, evolutions, and versioning. They ignored the very important point: exploiting the functions of multiple ontologies provide. This paper proposed a new framework for managing multiple ontologies based on the function-oriented perspective, and its goal is to bring multiple ontologies together to provide more powerful capabilities for the practical applications. The new multiple ontologies management architecture is more feasible and robust in the dynamic and distributed Semantic Web environment.