Alignment Based Measure of the Distance between Potentially Common Parts of Lightweight Ontologies
Ammar Mechouche, Nathalie Abadie, Sébastien Mustière · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2010
Abstract. We propose in this paper a method for measuring the distance between ontologies susceptible to describe a common domain and for assessing the feasibility of their integration. This method is in two steps: the first step determines the potentially common parts of two ontologies, based on a prior alignment carried out between them. The second step computes the distance between these parts with regards to both their levels of detail and their structures, by exploiting the mappings contained in the alignment and adapting the Tree Edit Distance method. We limit our study here to lightweight ontologies, i.e., taxonomies represented in OWL 1, the Ontology Web Language. This method was implemented and applied to real ontologies of the geographic domain. The results obtained so far seem significant.