Shapes of Alignments - Construction, Combination, and Computation

We present a general approach for representing and combining alignments and computing these combinations, based on the category theoretic notions of diagram, pushout, and colimit. This generalises the possible ‘shapes’ of alignments that have been introduced previously in similar approaches. We use the theory of institutions to represent heterogeneous ontologies, and show how the tool Hets can be employed to compute the colimit ontology of an alignment diagram.

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