Disjoint-Knowledge Analysis and Preservation in Ontology Merging Process

Ontology mapping and merging systems play a vital role that aim at promoting automatic interoperability among different heterogeneous systems, agents, web services or groups in open environments such as Semantic Web. These systems help ontologists to resolve different types of conflicts among local ontologies to produce global merged ontology. This paper provides three contributions to the study and design of ontology merging systems that provides complete, consistent and coherent merged global ontology. First, we analyze that one of the important merge requirements is ignored yet by state-of-the-art ontology mapping and merging systems, i.e., Disjoint-knowledge Preservation between concepts. Second, we introduce another type of semantic conflict, which needs attention for consistent and coherent merged ontology, i.e., Alignment Conflict among disjoint relations. Third, we present an overview of our semantic-based ontology merger, DKP-OM, as a solution for the generation of global merged ontology that is consistent, coherent and complete with respect to local ontologies. We conclude that disjoint knowledge analysis for ontology merging is very much helpful for the detection of inconsistent initial mappings that originate from concept name or instance matching strategies, reduce search space for concept matching, and promote consistent computation by exploiting reliable logical inference on facts by axiomatization.