Ontology Unification/Merging

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject Computer Science - Commercial Information Technology, grade: 1,0 (A), University of Trier (Information Systems), course: Technologien des Semantic Web, language: English, abstract: The idea of the Semantic Web is to allow internet content to be machine understandable and usable. Also, new knowledge should be inferable from already existing content. To achieve this, a machine must be proficient of merging information from different sources. This is no easy task as the Semantic Web will be just as heterogeneous as the web is today. OWL is a recommendation for a common language that will be used to encode knowledge on the Semantic Web in the form of ontologies. This paper will introduce OWL in general and describe some features that can be used to support merging of OWL files. Later, the process of merging OWL files and its three sub-processes mapping, aligning and combining will be described in detail. Also, some potential problems, which arise in merging, will be discussed. Later follows a quick evaluation of MoA and Prompt, two already available OWL merging tools.