Target-driven merging of Taxonomies

Authors: 
Raunich, S; Rahm, E
Author: 
Raunich, S
Rahm, E
Year: 
2010
Venue: 
Tech. Rep, University of Leipzig, Arxiv preprint 1012.4855
URL: 
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1012.4855
Citations: 
4
Citations range: 
1 - 9

The proliferation of ontologies and taxonomies in
many domains increasingly demands the integration of multiple
such ontologies. The goal of ontology integration is to merge two
or more given ontologies in order to provide a unified view on the
input ontologies while maintaining all information coming from
them. We propose a new taxonomy merging algorithm that, given
as input two taxonomies and an equivalence matching between
them, can generate an integrated taxonomy in a fully automatic
manner. The approach is target-driven, i.e. we merge a source
taxonomy into the target taxonomy and preserve the structure
of the target ontology as much as possible. We also discuss how
to extend the merge algorithm providing auxiliary information,
like additional relationships between source and target concepts,
in order to semantically improve the final result. The algorithm
was implemented in a working prototype and evaluated using
synthetic and real-world scenarios.