Monday, September 04, 2006
Minding the Planet: The Ontology Integration Problem
Minding the Planet: The Ontology Integration Problem: "In my own experience designing a number of OWL ontologies (500 classes - 3000 classes on average) it has often been easier to create my own custom ontology branches to cover various concepts than to try to integrate other ontologies of those concepts into my own.
One of the reasons for this is that each ontology has it's own naming conventions, philosophical orientation, domain nuances, design biases and tradeoffs, often guided by particular people and needs that drove their creation. Integrating across these different worldviews and underlying constraints is often hard. Simply stating that various classes or properties are equivalent is not necessarily a solution because thier inheritance may not in fact be equivalent and thus they may actually be semantically quite different in function, regardless of expressions of equivalence. OWL probably needs to be a lot more expressive in defining mappings between ontologies to truly resolve such subtle problems."
One of the reasons for this is that each ontology has it's own naming conventions, philosophical orientation, domain nuances, design biases and tradeoffs, often guided by particular people and needs that drove their creation. Integrating across these different worldviews and underlying constraints is often hard. Simply stating that various classes or properties are equivalent is not necessarily a solution because thier inheritance may not in fact be equivalent and thus they may actually be semantically quite different in function, regardless of expressions of equivalence. OWL probably needs to be a lot more expressive in defining mappings between ontologies to truly resolve such subtle problems."
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