A Category-theoretic Approach for the Detection of Conservativity Violations in Ontology Alignments

Ontologies are formal specifications that enable inferential processes over shared knowledge. In distributed contexts, applications frequently need to access information from multiple ontologies. For this end, concepts of two different ontologies must be matched through an alignment. If the alignment is not semantically sound, however, the integration of the ontologies may lead to unintended consequences. One type of possible consequences is the introduction of new subsumption relations between concepts from one of the input ontologies, which violate the conservativity principle. We propose a method based on the mathematical formalism of Category Theory for detecting such violations.