Research On Ontology Integration Based On E-Connections Theory

The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. Ontologies are expected to be a key element of Semantic Web applications by providing a source of shared and precisely defined terms that can be used for describing Web resources. With the continuous improvement of human awareness, ontologies are growing in number and scale. However, as the difference in building purpose, building methods and description, different ontologies have different reasoning ability, which bring tremendous difficulties in ontology combining, ontology reasoning, ontology inquiry and ontology maintaining. How to realize the knowledge sharing and ontology reusing is becoming a hot topic in the field of artificial intelligence.Description logic (DL) is the mathematical basis of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) which is being standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The expressive ability of OWL is directly from DL by which it is supported. The only means that the OWL standard provides for combining ontologies is the owl:imports construct, which allows to include by reference in a knowledge base all the axioms contained in another ontology, published elsewhere on the Web. This certainly provides some syntactic modularity, but not a logical modularity, which is indeed more desirable, as will shown in this thesis.E-Connections are a framework for combining logical formalisms, and have many desirable properties and, in particular, they are characterized by a very robust computational behavior. From the modeling perspective, each of the connected ontologies in an E-Connection is modeling a different application domain, while the E-Connection itself is the union of all these domains.This thesis presents a framework for ontology integration based on E-Connections theory and series relative algorithms, as well designs and implements a prototype system (E-Connections based Ontology Integration System, EBOIS). The work presented here aims at providing new method for ontology integration by ontology modularization. The experimental results reveal that the framework and algorithm are effective and valid.