Reaching Agreement over Ontology Alignments

Abstract

Abstract. When agents communicate, they do not necessarily use the same vocabulary or ontology. For them to interact successfully, they must find correspondences (mappings) between the terms used in their respective ontologies. While many proposals for matching two agent ontologies have been presented in the literature, the resulting alignment may not be satisfactory to both agents, and thus may necessitate additional negotiation to identify a mutually agreeable set of correspondences. We propose an approach for supporting the creation and exchange of different arguments, that support or reject possible correspondences. Each agent can decide, according to its preferences, whether to accept or refuse a candidate correspondence. The proposed framework considers arguments and propositions that are specific to the matching task and are based on the ontology semantics. This argumentation framework relies on a formal argument manipulation schema and on an encoding of the agents' preferences between particular kinds of arguments. Whilst the former does not vary between agents, the latter depends on the interests of each agent. Thus, this approach distinguishes clearly between alignment rationales which are valid for all agents and those specific to a particular agent.

Potluck: Data mash-up tool for casual users

“…In research, data alignment tools have been built mostly for experts and research has focused primarily on data modeling theories and automated agents for ontology alignment [7,8,10,11,12,13,14,16] rather than on user interfaces for making practical use of aggregated data. Because they specialize only in data alignment, they implicitly assume that users work with the data in delineated stages, first aligning the data and cleaning it up, and then making use of that data in some other tools.…”

A Cooperative Approach for Composite Ontology Mapping

“…However, in many domains, including the one under consideration, arguments lack this coercive force: they provide reasons which may be more or less persuasive [21]. Moreover, their persuasiveness may vary according to their audience.…”

“…The arguments in each preferred set are considered globally acceptable. [21] proposes to use an argument framework to deal with arguments that support or oppose candidate correspondences between ontologies. The mapping candidates are provided by a single service.…”

“…The accepted mappings resulting from argumentation are used to agent communication. Differently from [21], the mappings are obtained by different agents specialized on different mapping algorithms and not only in a single service. In [21], the mappings are assumed to be correct, and we are interested in how to obtain mapping sets by combining different approaches for ontology mapping.…”

“…Differently from [21], the mappings are obtained by different agents specialized on different mapping algorithms and not only in a single service. In [21], the mappings are assumed to be correct, and we are interested in how to obtain mapping sets by combining different approaches for ontology mapping. Moreover, in [21] it is assumed that arguments being negotiated have the same confidence.…”