Ontology Merging for Federated Ontologies on the Semantic Web

One of the core challenges for the Semantic Web is the aspect of decentralization. Local structures can be modeled by ontologies. However, in order to support global communication and knowledge exchange, mechanisms have to be developed for integrating the local systems. We adopt the database approach of autonomous federated database systems and consider an architecture for federated ontologies for the Semantic Web as starting point of our work. We identify the need for merging specific ontologies for developing federated, but still autonomous web systems. We present the method FCA–MERGE for merging ontologies following a bottom-up approach which offers a structural description of the merging process. The method is guided by application-specific instances of the given source ontologies that are to be merged. We apply techniques from natural language processing and formal concept analysis to derive a lattice of concepts as a structural result of FCA–MERGE. The generated result is then explored and transformed into the merged ontology with human interaction.