Putting things in context: A topological approach to mapping contexts to ontologies

Ontologies and contexts are complementary disciplines for modeling views. In the area of information integration, ontologies may be viewed as the outcome of a manual effort to model a domain, while contexts are system generated models. In this work, we provide a formal mathematical framework that delineates the relationship between contexts and ontologies. We then use the model to handle the uncertainty associated with automatic context extraction from existing documents by providing a ranking method, which ranks ontology concepts according to their suitability to a given context. Throughout this work we motivate our research using QUALEG, a European IST project that aims at providing local governments with an effective tool for bi-directional communication with citizens. We empirically evaluate our model using two real-world data sets, coming from Reuters and news RSS. Our empirical analysis shows that the input needed to accurately define a concept by a context is small, and the classification of documents to concepts is accurate.