The IFF Foundation for Ontological Knowledge Organization

This paper discusses an axiomatic approach for the semantic integration of ontologies, an approach that extends to first order logic, a previous approach1 based on information flow. This axiomatic approach is represented in the Information Flow Framework (IFF), a metalevel framework for organizing the information that appears in digital libraries, distributed databases and ontologies.2 The paper argues that the semantic integration of ontologies is the two-step process of alignment and unification. Ontological alignment consists of the sharing of common terminology and semantics through a mediating ontology. Ontological unification, concentrated in a virtual ontology of community connections, is fusion of the alignment diagram of participant community ontologies–the quotient of the sum of the participant portals modulo the ontological alignment structure. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Deliv-ery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: Website: © 2003 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]