SUO: Re: identity of terms when merging ontologies
Seth,
You could do graph structure mapping on the two ontologies to find a
candidate equivalence, but ultimately, I think this is a problem that
requires human intervention to solve. That's one reason why ontology
merging is problematic.
Adam
At 11:11 AM 9/1/2001 -0700, Seth Russell wrote:
>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
Adam Pease
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