On Capturing Semantics in Ontology Mapping

Semantic interoperability between disparate systems in open, distributed environments has become the quest of many practitioners in a variety of fields. One way to achieve such a goal is through ontology mapping. The perspective users of such technology, however, are faced with a number of challenges including ambiguity of the meaning of mappings, difficulties of capturing semantics, choice of the right ontology mapping tools, verification and validation of results and operationalisation in the beneficiary semantic web application. In this paper we present a formalisation of ontologies and a triangle model for the ontology mapping problems. This formalisation of ontology mapping reflects the engineering steps needed to materialise a versatile mapping system in order to faithfully re-capture the semantics embodied in ontologies which is the fundamental requirements posed by the semantic web environment. We further accommodate this formalisation with a series of specialist algorithms targeting at particular aspects of semantic capturing. Finally, we evaluated the proposed algorithms by way of ontology mapping benchmark tests.