Abstract
Organizational knowledge typically comes from many independent sources, each with its own semantics. This paper describes a methodology by which information from large numbers of such sources can be associated, organized, and merged. The hypothesis is that a multiplicity of ontology fragments, representing the semantics of the independent sources, can be related to each other automatically without the use of a global ontology. That is, any pair of ontologies can be related indirectly through a semantic bridge consisting of many other previously unrelated ontologies, even when there is no way to determine a direct relationship between them. The relationships among the ontology fragments indicate the relationships among the sources, enabling the source information to be categorized and organized. A preliminary evaluation of the methodology has been conducted by relating 53 small, independently developed ontologies for a single domain. A nice feature of the methodology is that common parts of the ontologies reinforce each other, while unique parts are de-emphasized. The result is a consensus ontology.
The original version of this chapter was revised: The copyright line was incorrect. This has been corrected. The Erratum to this chapter is available at DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-35621-1_43
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© 2003 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
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Huhns, M.N., Stephens, L.M. (2003). Semantic Bridging of Independent Enterprise Ontologies. In: Kosanke, K., Jochem, R., Nell, J.G., Bas, A.O. (eds) Enterprise Inter- and Intra-Organizational Integration. ICEIMT 2002. IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing, vol 108. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35621-1_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35621-1_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4757-5151-2
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