2006 ASurveyonOntologyMapping

(Choi et al., 2006) ⇒ Namyoun Choi, Il-Yeol Song, and Hyoil Han. (2006). “A Survey on Ontology Mapping.” In: ACM SIGMOD Record Journal, 35(3). doi:10.1145/1168092.1168097

Subject Headings: Ontology Mapping, Ontology Integration, Ontology Merging.

Notes

Cited By

2013

(Shvaiko & Euzenat, 2013) ⇒ Pavel Shvaiko, and Jérôme Euzenat. (2013). “Ontology Matching: state of the art and future challenges.” Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on 25, no. 1 (2013): 158-176.

Quotes

Abstract

Ontology is increasingly seen as a key factor for enabling interoperability across heterogeneous systems and semantic web applications. Ontology mapping is required for combining distributed and heterogeneous ontologies. Developing such ontology mapping has been a core issue of recent ontology research. This paper presents ontology mapping categories, describes the characteristics of each category, compares these characteristics, and surveys tools, systems, and related work based on each category of ontology mapping. We believe this paper provides readers with a comprehensive understanding of ontology mapping and points to various research topics about the specific roles of ontology mapping.

Introduction

An ontology is defined as a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization.”[27] Tasks on distributed and heterogeneous systems demand support from more than one ontology. Multiple ontologies need to be accessed from different systems. The distributed nature of ontology development has led to dissimilar ontologies for the same or overlapping domains. Thus, various parties with different ontologies do not fully understand each other. To solve these problems, it is necessary to use ontology mapping geared for interoperability. This article aims to present the broad scope of ontology mapping, mapping categories, their characteristics, and a comprehensive overview of ontology mapping tools, systems, and related work.

We classify ontology mapping into the following three categories: 1) mapping between an integrated global ontology and local ontologies [3,4,1,7], 2) mapping between local ontologies [6,1,8,9,12,13,14], and 3) mapping on ontology merging and alignment. [15,16,17,18,19,20]

The first category of ontology mapping supports ontology integration by describing the relationship between an integrated global ontology and local ontologies. The second category enables interoperability for highly dynamic and distributed environments as mediation between distributed data in such environments. The third category is used as a part of ontology merging or alignment as an ontology reuse process.

In this paper, we survey the tools, systems, and related work about ontology mapping based on these three ontology mapping categories. A comparison of tools or systems about ontology mapping is made based on specific evaluation criteria[10], which are input requirements, level of user interaction, type of output, content of output, and the following five dimensions: structural, lexical, domain, instance-based knowledge, and type of result. [8] Through a comparative analysis of ontology mapping categories, we aim to provide readers with a comprehensive understanding of ontology mapping and point to various research topics about the specific roles of ontology mapping.

The paper is organized as follows. The meanings of ontology mapping]4, 3, 7, 15, 25], ontology integration, merging, and alignment [2, 24] are outlined in Section 2. In Section 3, characteristics and application domains of three different categories of ontology mapping are discussed. The tools, systems, frameworks, and related work of ontology mapping are surveyed based on the three different ontology mapping categories. Then the overall comparison of tools or systems about ontology mapping is presented. In Section 4, a conclusion and presentation of future work are detailed.

2. Terminology: ontology mapping, ontology integration, merging, and alignment

In this section, we set the scope of ontology mapping and ontology mapping tools, and outline meanings of ontology mapping, integration, merging, and alignment. We aim to give a wide view of ontology mapping including integration, merging, and alignment because this concept of ontology mapping is broad in scope[5] and ontology mapping is required in the process of integration, merging, and alignment. Furthermore, one closely related research topic with ontology mapping is schema matching, which has been one major area of database research. [3, 36, 37, 38] However, this is beyond our scope in this paper. We also refer to tools for ontology integration, merging, and alignment as ontology mapping tools in this paper. We discuss the meanings of ontology mapping based on the three different ontology mapping categories.

Ontology merging, integration, and alignment

Ontology merging, integration, and alignment can be considered as an ontology reuse process. [2,24] Ontology merging is the process of generating a single, coherent ontology from two or more existing and different ontologies related to the same subject.26 A merged single coherent ontology includes information from all source ontologies but is more or less unchanged. The original ontologies have similar or overlapping domains but they are unique and not revisions of the same ontology. Ontology alignment is the task of creating links between two original ontologies. Ontology alignment is made if the sources become consistent with each other but are kept separate.15 Ontology alignment is made when they usually have complementary domains. Ontology integration is the process of generating a single ontology in one subject from two or more existing and different ontologies in different subjects. The different subjects of the different ontologies may be related. Some change is expected in a single integrated ontology.

Ontology mapping

Ontology mapping between an integrated global ontology and local ontologies. [4,3,7] In this case, ontology mapping is used to map a concept found in one ontology into a view, or a query over other ontologies (e.g. over the global ontology in the local-centric approach, or over the local ontologies in the global-centric approach).

Ontology mapping between local ontologies. [25] In this case, ontology mapping is the process that transforms the source ontology entities into the target ontology entities based on semantic relation. The source and target are semantically related at a conceptual level. Ontology mapping in ontology merge and alignment. [15] In this case, ontology mapping establishes correspondence among source (local) ontologies to be merged or aligned, and determines the set of overlapping concepts, synonyms, or unique concepts to those sources.15 This mapping identifies similarities and conflicts between the various source (local) ontologies to be merged or aligned.5

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4. Conclusion

This paper has presented a broad scope of ontology mapping, mapping categories and characteristics, and surveyed ontology mapping tools, systems, and related work based on ontology mapping categories as follows: a mapping between an integrated global ontology and local ontologies, a mapping between local ontologies, and a mapping on ontology merging and alignment. The different roles of these three ontology mapping categories were also identified. Techniques for a mapping between local ontologies have not been widely used for a mapping between a global ontology and local ontologies for two reasons. First, mapping between a global ontology and local ontolgies is done in the process of ontology integration or when a global ontology exists. [3,4,7] Second, some techniques for a mapping between local ontolgies are aimed at distributed ontologies on the Semantic Web, ontologies which have mutually inconsistent concepts or requirements of a more dynamic or flexible form of mapping. [1,6,8,9,12,22,32]

Further research is needed to improve methods of constructing an integrated global ontology, utilizing the mapping techniques for local ontologies in order to map between an integrated global ontology and local ontologies. In addition, research about the usage or roles of ontology mapping in different application domains should be performed. Research aimed at developing sufficiently applicable mapping techniques between local ontologies for the same or overlapping domain will improve ontology merge and alignment processes. In order to find an accurate ontology mapping, accurate similarity measurements between source ontology entities and target ontology entities should be considered. Techniques for complex ontology mappings between ontologies and discovering more constraints in ontologies should be also investigated.

References

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	Author	volume	Date Value	title	type	journal	titleUrl	doi	note	year
2006 ASurveyonOntologyMapping	Il-Yeol Song Namyoun Choi Hyoil Han			A Survey on Ontology Mapping			http://www.sigmod.org/publications/sigmod-record/0609/p34-article-song.pdf	10.1145/1168092.1168097		2006