Towards Domain Ontology Interoperability Measurement

Ontologies are reliable interoperability support components between information systems. However the need to make ontologies themselves interoperable to a measurable degree remains a challenge due to the semantic heteroginity problem. This paper specifically looks at domain ontologies and how to measure the interoperability degree between them to establish the extent to which they can replace each other. Different interoperability operations, semantic distance measures and lexical similarity between ontologies are dicussed. A method based on model management theory with algebraic operations such as match on the ontology models is proposed to measure lexical and structural dimensions of domain ontologies and give a value for their degree of interoperability. An example of how to compute the degree of interoperability between two domain ontologies using the proposed approach is given with an explanation of how the identified gaps can be addressed.