Two Obvious Intuitions: Ontology-Mapping Needs Background Knowledge and Approximation

Summary form only given. Ontology mapping (or: ontology alignment, or integration) is one of the most active areas the semantic Web area. An increasing amount of ontologies are becoming available in recent years, and if the semantic Web is to be taken seriously, the problem of ontology mapping must be solved. In this article the author discuss recent work where we have quantitatively shown that indeed, ontology mapping can benefit from background knowledge, and that, somewhat surprisingly, more background knowledge leads to continuously improving results. We also discuss how the use of such background knowledge can be exploited to find approximate mappings when perfect mappings cannot be found