Aligning ontologies using multi agent technology

Abstract

Modern information systems extensively use ontologies to model domain knowledge. With the large amount of already available ontologies, there is a high demand for sharing and reusing the knowledge in existing ontologies. Since ontologies are complex structures, sharing of knowledge coming from various ontologies has become a tedious task. This has resulted in the birth of research area called ontology alignment. There are numerous techniques for the alignment of ontologies, and the field still faces many challenges. Due to the inherent nature of multiple relationships among the ontologies, it postulates that the Multi-Agent System technology is a better technology to automate the ontology alignment with little human intervention. This paper presents multi-agent based approach for ontology alignment, developed as a plugin for the popular ontological modelling environment known as Protege. It simulates how different processes interactively operate inside the human mind to perform certain activities intelligently. Indeed, the proposed solution uses agent communication, negotiation, and coordination as the primary method of exploring the semantic relationships between the ontologies. The system accepts ontologies maintained in any major form of ontology representation languages as its inputs, and generates ontology with new semantic relationships as its output. The generated ontology could be used as a shared understanding between information systems that are running on input ontologies. The success of the proposed approach was evaluated by using ontologies of conference organizing and agricultural domains. It was evident that the system could discover over 70% accurate relationships, and thus, the authors claim that the proposed approach could resolve the complexity in ontology alignment.