| Ontologies are clearly the most important feature of the Semantic Web, as demonstrated in Chapter 1. Ontology Merging is the key operation that will be needed for the effective operation of the Semantic Web, and this is the focus of Chapter 2. In Chapter 3, we prove that the development of Ontologies with the explicit goal of facilitating Ontology Merging is hugely beneficial to the Semantic Web.; In Chapter 4, we prove that well formed formulations of Nodes, Levels, Paths, Subtrees, Trees and Ontologies leads to easier development of intelligent ontology merge operations and algorithms. In Chapter 5, we show that an explicit specification of various ontology types leads to a cluster of efficient ontology merge algorithms. The results of the experiments show that the Ontology formulations and Ontology Merge algorithms developed in this work are realizable in polynomial time. |
