AT ool For Mapping Between Two Ontologies Using Explicit Information

Understanding the meaning of messages exchanged between software agents has long been realized as one of the key problems to realizing multi-agent systems. Forcing all agents to use a common vocabulary de£ned in a shared ontology is an oversimpli£ed 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 (Weisman, Roos and Vogt(Weisman, Roos, & Vogt ), Pinto(Pinto, Prez, & Martins 1999)). In this paper, we present our work along this direction. This work combines the recently emerging semantic markup language DAML+OIL (for ontology speci£cation), the information retrieval technique (for similarity information collection), and Bayesian reasoning (for similarity synthesis and £nal mapping selection), to provide ontology mapping between two classi£cation hierarchies.