Merging Taxonomies under RCC-5 Algebraic Articulations

Taxonomies are widely used to classify information, and multiple (possibly competing) taxonomies often exist for the same domain. Given a set of correspondences between two taxonomies, it is often necessary to “merge” the taxonomies, thereby creating a unied taxonomy (e.g., that can then be used by data integration and discovery applications). We present an algorithm for merging taxonomies that have been related using articulations given as RCC-5 constraints. Two taxa N and M can be related using (disjunctions of) the ve base relations in RCC-5: N≡M; N ? M; N ?; N ? M (partial overlap of N and M); and N ! M (disjointness: N ∩ M = ?). RCC-5 is increasingly being adopted by scientists to specify mappings between large biological taxonomies. We discuss the properties of the proposed merge algorithm and evaluate our approach using real-world taxonomies.