Merging Taxonomies under RCC-5 Algebraic Articulations
David Thau, Shawn Bowers, Bertram Ludaescher · Journal of Computing Science and Engineering · 2009
Taxonomies are widely used to classify information, and multiple (possibly competing) taxonomies often exist for the same domain. Given a set of correspondences between two taxonomies, it is often necessary to "merge" the taxonomies, thereby creating a unied taxonomy (e.g., that can then be used by data integration and discovery applications). We present an algorithm for merging taxonomies that have been related using articulations given as RCC-5 constraints. Two taxa Nand M can be related using (disjunctions of) the ve base relations in RCC-5: M; N ${\subseteq}$ M; N ${\supseteq}$ ; N ${\oplus}$ M (partial overlap of Nand M); and N ! M (disjointness: N ${\cap}$ M = ${\varnothing}$ ). RCC-5 is increasingly being adopted by scientists to specify mappings between large biological taxonomies. We discuss the properties of the proposed merge algorithm and evaluate our approach using real-world taxonomies.