AN ALGEBRA FOR ONTOLOGIES
Saket Kaushik, Duminda Wijesekera and Paul Ammann
International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2006)
Baltimore, Maryland (USA), November 9-11, 2006
Abstract
Decentralized control and independence means restricted availability of internet domain information. Therefore, applications that require a unified, simplified view of resources and their relationships must combine or compose independently developed ontologies. A review of current literature reveals many practical solutions for solving this problem, but little conceptual or theoretical understanding of the issues involved. This lack of understanding prevents us from making effective comparisons between available solutions, and evaluate their applicability to a specific scenario. In this work, we fill this gap in the understanding of ontology composition in the following way. First, we develop a recursive countable type system for resource description framework (RDF), the default common language for expressing ontologies on the web. Second, we develop an algebra for composition of ontologies that supports structural comparisons between ontologies; this contribution fixes several flaws in earlier proposals of the same kind. Third and finally, we provide comparisons of existing solutions to algebraic operations introduced in our work. This, we believe, will help producers and consumers of composed ontologies pick and choose most suitable solution for their specific application.