Using Explicit Information To Map Between Two Ontologies

Understanding the meaning of messages exchanged between software agents has long been recognized as one of the key problems in realizing multi-agent systems. Forcing all agents to use a common vocabulary defined in a shared ontology is an oversimplified solution, especially when these agents are designed and deployed independently of each other. An alternative, and more realistic, solution would be to provide mapping services between different ontologies. In this paper we present our work along this direction. This work combines the recently emerging semantic markup language DAML+OIL (for ontology specification), information retrieval techniques (for similarity information collection), and Bayesian reasoning (for similarity synthesis and final mapping selection) to provide an ontology mapping between two classification hierachies.