Ontology Alignment

Ontology Alignment

Background:

It's a common phenomenon that a mutual understanding of concepts is required for effective and efficient communication among various individuals or machines. Heterogeneity is a big issue. The specifications mentioned by clients contain ambiguous information due to the usage of their natural language. An analyst may interpret those requirements by using different terminologies that convey the same meanings. Hence, the question is how to create shared understandings regarding various concepts. Such problems can be easily solved through ontology because it specifies shared conceptualization in an understandable manner.

Definition:

The word ontology is in fact a Greek word and its meaning is 'existence. The foundations of ontology were initially introduced by the Greek philosophers Aristotle and Socrates .Ontology offers a shared terminology that clearly specifies objects' types, their attributes and relationships. Moreover, this technique is used for auto-recognition of concepts, their meanings, and classification.

Scope:

A wide range of ontologies have been created due to the advancement in technology. Ontology applications are being used in various sectors including industries, administrations and universities. The requirement of each sector is different from other therefore such ontology applications contain overlapping data. In short, these are logical structures for arranging information.

The ontology is considered to be a vital element in many walks of life such as philosophy, knowledge management, E-commerce, distributed data management systems, system and software engineering, library sciences, biomedical informatics, enterprise bookmarking, information technology, artificial intelligence and Semantic Web. Ontology specifies the meanings of standardized terms for general public. Ontology opens new horizons of developments especially in the field of artificial intelligence and semantic Web. Here, the concepts are defined in both human and machine-understandable form that makes applications quite intelligent.

In computer science this term represents types, properties, and relationship categories of different entities. Similarly, in philosophy ontology is used for representing different entities, occurrences, and concepts. The word "ontology" is used by AI (Artificial Intelligence) Engineers and web researchers for meeting their individual requirements.

Core ontology:

Core ontology can be defined as a structural relationship that is

Where

* S represents structure

* C and R are two disjoint sets having elements that can be termed as concept identifiers and relation identifier.

* A partial order <c on C, termed as taxonomy or concept hierarchy.

* A function , which is