Ontology Interoperability Techniques, The State of the Art
Siham Amrouch, Sihem Mostefai
Journal of Information Organization, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2012.
DOI: 
Link: http://www.dline.info/jio/fulltext/v1n1/3.pdf
Abstract:
Since the emergence of semantic web, researchers are facing a great challenge to represent the semantics of data in order to bring the actual web into its full power and hence achieve its objective. Herein, ontologies have emerged as the best means to accomplish the task because of their ability to explicitly specify the modeled domains. Indeed, ontologies are also designed and developed to be shared between several organizations and information systems. Using ontologies as common or shared vocabularies requires a certain degree of interoperability between them. Therefore, the interoperability between different ontologies that model the same or similar domains is a challenging issue that can be handled by ontology mapping, alignment and merging processes. These later produce a Meta layer accessible by different applications and information systems, of course with preserving the semantics embedded in all the source ontologies. In this paper we aim to introduce the three main techniques of ontology interoperability, namely, ontology mapping, alignment and merging. These techniques constitute the basis for several other ontology interoperability techniques. This basis is built during the mapping discovery stage which is the meeting point for all ontology interoperability techniques. Several tools and algorithms for ontology Mapping, Alignment and Merging exist in the literature. In this paper, we will survey and compare the most outstanding ones after describing their common stage which is the mapping discovery process, then discuss the main forms of heterogeneities met and that have to be solved in order to bridge the semantic gap between the source ontologies.