PROMI (Platform for the Reuse of Ontologies through Merging and Integration) is a Java-based tool promoting the re-use of Web ontologies. It is intended to provide guidance to ontology developers during the evaluation, comparison, merging and integration of existing ontological resources at a technological and methodological level.
From a process point of view, PROMI divides ontology re-use into 3 major steps which correspond to generic and extendable system components: the evaluation, the comparison and the merging/integration of the reusable ontologies towards the realization of the target ontology. The evaluation component aids ontology engineers and domain experts with a means to detect and rank those ontologies which are likely to be relevant to their application needs. Once the list of potential re-use candidates has been established, those covering overlapping contents are compared with the help of various matching heuristics. The current implementation involves linguistic matchers operating at the level of ontological primitives. In the next release we will extend this component with algorithms taking into account the structure of the underlying structures. The next step within the re-use process is the integration of the sources on the basis of the results of the matching procedure. The process can be performed incrementally: the user can specify the ontological primitives which are involved in matching, merging and integration which are then performed accordingly.
Franziska Liebsch
Marko Harasic
Elena Paslaru-Bontas
Elena Paslaru-Bontas
AG Netzbasierte Informationssysteme
Freie Universität Berlin
