OntoManager A Workbench Environment to facilitate Ontology Management and Interoperability.pdf

OntoManager: A Workbench Environment to facilitate Ontology Management and Interoperability Adil Hameed, Derek Sleeman, Alun Preece Department of Computing Science University of Aberdeen Aberdeen AB24 3UE Scotland, U.K. {ahameed, dsleeman, apreece}@csd.abdn.ac.uk http://www.csd.abdn.ac.uk/research/ Abstract. The prime motivation for our research is to enable sharing and reuse of domain knowledge through the engineering and management of ontologies. We contend that there is a need to reconcile ontologies by harmonising mis- matches and discrepancies that are present among them. This is a necessary task before any stakeholders can begin to share and/or reuse the underlying knowl- edge (re)sources. Our key objective is to detect and resolve these mismatches in a consistent and verifiable manner. We have evaluated the state-of-the-art in on- tology management tools and selected the best-in-class techniques and methods. We propose implementing a workbench that will integrate these tools and en- able interoperability between them in order to facilitate the management of on- tologies. 1 Introduction Researchers have identified various kinds of ontological discrepancies [1, 2, 3, 4] and several types of inconsistencies that are inherent in knowledge and data sources [5, 6]. Also, impediments that are likely to occur during the elicitation of knowledge from multiple experts have been recognised [7]. Further, suggestions have been made about classifications and categorisations of such mismatches [2, 3, 6]. Recently, there has been considerable interest in developing tools and techniques to assist in a variety of ontology management operations, e.g., mapping, merging, alignment, integration, etc. [8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13]. For any of these processes to be carried out successfully, it is inevitable that mismatches be detected and resolved. None of the available tools tackle all the types of discrepancies we have identified [3]. Moreover, the variou