Formalizing ontology reconciliation techniques as a basis for meaningful mediation in service-related tasks
Patrício de Alencar Silva, Cláudia M. F. A. Ribeiro, Ulrich Schiel · 2007
With the advent of Semantic Web, the fast dissemination of ontologies to represent and share information causes a deep impact on knowledge retrieval, as a whole. In this context, the use of different ontologies to express meaning on the same application domain leads to a kind of "Tower of Babel Effect" on the Web, bringing new problems to the communication among different applications. This problem still remains in service-oriented architectures, considering that a same service can be described by the use of different ontologies and standards. Therefore, the urge of an ontology reconciliation approach arises in order to enable communication despite the differences. This paper focuses on providing a formal description of ontology reconciliation techniques, such as merging, alignment and integration, to provide better understanding of how these techniques can be used on the scope of Semantic Web Services Architecture.