Formal Method for Aligning Goal Ontologies

Many distributed heterogeneous systems interoperate and exchange information between them. Currently, most systems are described in terms of ontologies. When ontologies are distributed, the problem of finding related concepts between them arises. This problem is undertaken by a process which defines rules to relate relevant parts of different ontologies, called "Ontology Alignment." In literature, most of the methodologies proposed to reach the ontology alignment, are semi automatic or directly conducted by hand. In the present; paper, we propose an automatic and dynamic technique for aligning ontologies. Our main interest is focused oil ontologies describing services provided by systems. In fact, the notion of service is a key one in the description and in the functioning of distributed systems. Based on a teleological assumption, services are related to goals through the paradigm 'Service as goal achievement', through the use of ontologies of services, or precisely goals. These ontologies are called "Goal Ontologies." So, in this study we investigate an approach where the, alignment of ontologies provides full semantic integration between distributed goal ontologies in the engineering domain, based oil the Barwise and Seligman Information Flow (noted IF) model.