Combining Structural and Instance-Based Ontology Similarities for Mapping Web Directories

Ontologies are knowledge bodies describing the semantics of data and are broadly applied in supporting knowledge exchange between different parties. However, the adoption of the same ontology over a certain domain of interest by different people or organizations is unlikely, mainly due to the decentralized nature of ontology development. The paper presents a procedure for mapping hierarchical ontologies, populated with instances taken from properly classified text documents. It combines a structural and instance-based approaches in order to yield concept-to- concept mapping assertions between two input ontologies. It can be successfully applied to finding correspondences between the elements of two directories.