Schema and constraints-based matching and merging of Topic Maps

In this paper, we propose a multi-strategic matching and merging approach to find correspondences between ontologies based on the syntactic or semantic characteristics and constraints of the Topic Maps. Our multi-strategic matching approach consists of a linguistic module and a Topic Map constraints-based module. A linguistic module computes similarities between concepts using morphological analysis, string normalization and tokenization and language-dependent heuristics. A Topic Map constraints-based module takes advantage of several Topic Maps-dependent techniques such as a topic property-based matching, a hierarchy-based matching, and an association-based matching. This is a composite matching procedure and need not generate a cross-pair of all topics from the ontologies because unmatched pairs of topics can be removed by characteristics and constraints of the Topic Maps. Merging between Topic Maps follows the matching operations. We set up the MERGE function to integrate two Topic Maps into a new Topic Map, which satisfies such merge requirements as entity preservation, property preservation, relation preservation, and conflict resolution. For our experiments, we used oriental philosophy ontologies, western philosophy ontologies, Yahoo western philosophy dictionary, and Wikipedia philosophy ontology as input ontologies. Our experiments show that the automatically generated matching results conform to the outputs generated manually by domain experts and can be of great benefit to the following merging operations. 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd.