Addressing Issues in Foundational Ontology Mediation

Abstract

Abstract:An approach in achieving semantic interoperability among heterogeneous systems is to offer infrastructure to assist with linking and integration using a foundational ontology. Due to the creation of multiple foundational ontologies, this also means linking and integrating those ones. In order to achieve this, we have selected the widely used foundational ontologies DOLCE, BFO, and GFO, and their related modules, on which to perform ontology mediation (alignment, mapping, and merging). The foundational ontologies were aligned by identifying correspondences between ontology entities using seven tools, documentation, and our manual alignments, and comparing their effectiveness. Thereafter, based on the alignments, we created correspondences in the ontology files resulting in entity mappings and merged ontologies. However, during the mapping process, it was found that differences in foundational ontologies, such as their hierarchical structure, conflicting axioms due to complement and disjointness, and incompatible domain and range restriction, cause logical inconsistencies in foundational ontology alignments, thereby greatly reducing the number of mappings. We analyse and present these logical inconsistencies with possible solutions to some of them.

Foundational ontologies meet ontology matching: A survey

“…As stated in [42], while the purpose of a foundational ontology is to address interoperability among ontologies, the development of different foundational ontologies re-introduces the interoperability problem. As briefly discussed in the previous section, these ontologies have been developed directed at different classes of applications, as well as relying on different theoretical assumptions.…”

“…Other studies addressed other foundational ontologies. In [42], alignments between BFO, DOLCE and GFO have been established with automatic matching tools and manually, with substantially fewer alignments found by the matching tools. The alignments in the context of the whole ontology revealed a considerable number of logical inconsistencies.…”

“…This work has been extended in [73] in two ways: considering matching systems participating in OAEI 2018, and a new pair of aligned foundational ontologies (SUMO and DOLCE). The alignments in [42] and [59] served as a reference alignment to automatically evaluate the matchers. Examples of reference correspondences include: (bfo:Occurrent,dolce-lite:perdurant, ≡) and (dolce-lite:artifact,sumo:Device, ).…”

“…While more automation is an obvious requirement in the field, the poor performance of solutions addressing automatically matching different foundational ontologies or with domain ontologies have demonstrated the difficulty of the task, as reported in experiments evaluating current matching tools [42,71]. Current tools fail on correctly capturing the semantics behind concepts (even when such semantics are present), which requires deeper contextualization on the basis of hierarchies and axioms.…”