Start Date: January 1, 2006
Spiliopoulos Vasileios
Keywords: ontology, ontology mapping/merging, sense disambiguation, semantic webNowadays, the research community realizes the important role of ontologies as the basic
technology for efficient knowledge management, as well as for the evolution of the World
Wide Web (WWW) towards its semantic counterpart. The problems, though, related to the
rapid development of ontologies and their continuous maintenance; stiffen the proliferation
of the semantic web and the applications that this technology supports. The success of
semantic web depends heavily on the rapid and low cost development and evolution of
multiple ontologies as well as on their efficient exploitation. To date, the above processes
require a lot of human effort in order to be implemented by domain experts. They are very
costly and time consuming, so the need for automatic or semi automatic methods for these
tasks arises.
This concerns the cases where more than one ontologies of the same domain must be
considered. These ontologies may represent different types of data or they may represent the
same types of data, but containing different concepts, properties, relationships, etc. (different
not only in names used but also in what they really represent in the context of the specific
domain, since they may
have been constructed by different domain experts). Ontology coordination methods
are used to handle such cases. In an ontology coordination process, mapping, alignment and
merging are the major sub-processes. Coordination can be performed using either a
reference ontology or directly, but maintaining the semantic of each ontology at the end.
Objective of this doctorate is the investigation of new methods of automatic co-ordination of
ontologies. The existing methodologies that support the co-ordination of ontologies use only
a segment of the available knowledge, while the human factor is taken into consideration only at the final stage of process of co-ordination (that is to say at the fusion). The proposed
inquiring activity will supplement and will extend the existing results in the following subjects:
• Investigation of possibilities of exploitation of texts, but also data bases relative with a thematic region for the support of co-ordination of ontologies in this region.
• Study of techniques on the exploitation of taxonomic and non taxonomic relations.
• Development of heuristic algorithms and methods of constraint satisfaction for the better and more effective exploitation and combination of the above techniques.
• Development of prototype systems that will be disposed via the World Wide Web for the support of new methodologies.
• Determination of the frame of evaluation of methods that will be developed taking into consideration existing metres and processes of evaluation.