SUO: identity of terms when merging ontologies
From: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@bestweb.net>
> Given the axioms for theory A and the axioms for theory B,
> you can create the axioms for the combined theory C
> by using the cat (concatenate) command in Unix:
> cat A B > C
> This creates a new file C, which contains all the axioms for
> both A and B.
Well in relational db terms: (a) create a data base containing both sets of
records , (b) add a field that specifies the original source of the axiom,
and (c) adjust each term of each statement to use the same namespace
strategy.
> There are now two more questions one would like to ask:
> 1. Is the new theory consistent?
> 2. Are any of the axioms redundant?
I think we need to add a step preceding those two. The identity of the
terms used in both theories need to be matched. Of course if the theories
were originally designed with the same terms, this step is trivial, but
otherwise it could approach a can of worms. For example: Doug likes 'isa'
, Adam likes 'instance', and DAML likes 'type'. Exclusive of the
difference in the axioms which, I assume, will be dealt with in your steps
(1&2 above) these are pretty much the same concept and, I would think, any
~merged~ ontology would need to ~smush~ [1] them together somehow. But if
we just concat the files after making adjustment (c) above, they just end up
being in different namespaces.
How do we resolve this identity problem?
[1] http://rdfweb.org/2001/01/design/smush.html
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2001Jan/0030.html
I cc'd SWAG [3] on this because it was created to deal with problems like
this.
[3] http://purl.org/SWAG/
Seth Russell