FCA-MERGE: Bottom-up Merging of Ontologies

Abstract

Ontologies have been established for knowledge sharing and are widely used as a means for conceptually structuring domains of interest. With the growing usage of ontologies, the problem of overlapping knowledge in a common domain becomes critical. We propose the new 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 two 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. 1 Introduction Ontologies have been established for knowledge sharing and are widely used as a means for conceptually structuring domains of interest. With the growing usage of ontologies, the problem of overlapping kn...