A new methodology to streamline ontology integration processes

To reuse ontologies of different types, ontology mediation is required to reconcile mismatches between heterogeneous ontologies. Ontology integration is one of the major kind of ontology mediations in which an ontology is selected to integrate either directly into an ontology development process if no other suitable ontology is available or into an ontology development process with other chosen ontology(ies). The integration methodology developed by Pinto and Martins has two major limitations in its design: 1) the methodology only focuses on how to find, select and integrate existing ontologies but fails to recognize integration itself is part of an ontology development process, and 2) the methodology also fails to be supported by any form of semi- or automatic tools especially in finding suitable knowledge modules from a group of candidate ontologies. To address the above limitations, this research proposes a new ontology integration methodology that provides a detailed description on how to incorporate and perform integration including elicitation of key terms, identification of source ontologies and their knowledge modules, and application of ontology integration. This research also proposes a semiautomatic tool called Integration-oriented Candidate Ontology Evaluation System (ICOES) that can be used to find suitable source ontologies from a group of candidate ontologies using as a single or a combination of matching techniques as well as concept distribution counter. Based on the matching results generated by the ICOES, the most appropriate candidate ontologies can be selected as source ontologies.