Ontology alignment
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Ontology Alignment is the process of determining correspondences between concepts. The phrase takes on a slightly different meaning, depending on the discipline.
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[edit] Computer Science
For Computer Scientists, concepts are expressed as labels for data. Historically, the need for ontology alignment arose out of the need to integrate hetereogeneous databases, ones developed independently and thus each having their own data vocabulary. Ontology alignment tools find classes of data that are "semantically equivalent," for example, "Truck" and "Lorry." The classes are not necessarily logically identical. According to [Shvaiko and Euzenat 2005], there are three major dimensions for similarity: syntactic, external, and semantic. Coincidentally, they roughly correspond to the dimensions identified by Cognitive Scientists below. A number of tools and frameworks have been developed for aligning ontologies, some with inspiration from Cognitive Science and some independently.
Since the emergence of the Resource Description Framework line of languages, ontology alignment tools have generally been developed to operate on database schemas, xml schemas, taxonomies, formal languages, entity-relationship models, dictionaries, and other label frameworks after conversion to a semantic graph. Such a graph usually consists of triples of the form <subject, predicate, object>, as best illustrated in the Notation 3 syntax.
In this context, ontology alignment is sometimes referred to as "ontology matching".
[edit] Cognitive Science
For Cognitive Scientists interested in Ontology Alignment, the "concepts" are nodes in a semantic networks that reside in brains as "conceptual systems." The focal question is: if everyone has unique experiences and thus different semantic networks, then how can we ever understand each other? This question has been addressed by a model called ABSURDIST (Aligning Between Systems Using Relations Derived Inside Systems for Translation). [Goldstone and Rogosky 2002] identified three major dimensions for similarity as equations for "internal similarity, external similarity, and mutual inhibition."
Ontology alignment is closely related to analogy formation, where "concepts" are variables in logic expressions.
[edit] Philosophy
For Philosophers, much like Cognitive Scientists, the interest is in the nature of "understanding." The roots of discourse, however, may be traced to Radical Interpretation.
[edit] See also
- Ontology
- Data conversion
- Interpretation "An interpretation can be the part of a presentation or portrayal of information altered in order to conform to a specific set of symbols."
