Concept similarity in multirelational application ontologies

Determining concept similarity in heterogeneous ontologies is a vital problem in the area of the semantic web. Current approaches normally consider single hierarchial concept relations, only, which fail to express rich and implied information. Moreover, concept similarity under multiple relations as required in many application scenarios of semantic web services has not been investigated, yet. Basing on a method to merge heterogenous ontologies into an application ontology, here a representation model for application ontologies is elaborated. It has the form of a semantic net with multiple weighted concept relations, for which a novel algorithm to assess concept similarity is presented.