James (Zijun) Wang

Ontology Comparison

Ontology is an explicit formal specification on how to represent the objects, concepts and other entities, which are assumed to exist in some area of interest, and the relationships among them. However the concepts in ontology are represented in natural language words. As meaning of words and understanding of concepts differ in different communities, different users might use the same word for different concepts, or use different words for the same concept, or they might make different ontological assumptions about their concepts. Such possible heterogeneity causes problems in interoperability of knowledge resources. With the growing access to heterogeneous and independent data repositories, determining the semantic similarity or difference of two ontologies is critical in information retrieval, information integration and semantic web query. Especially when P2P semantic web services become popular, it is necessary to provide an online tool for efficiently measuring the similarity of ontologies. The semantic web agents can use the tool to make query routing decisions based on the similarity or difference of the ontologies provided by semantic web services. Currently there is no such tool available on internet due to the complexity of existing ontology comparison algorithms and certain requirement for human involvement in these algorithms. We fill the void by developing a web service for ontology comparison based on a senses refinement algorithm.