Ontology Matching

Recent research on the use of ontologies in the Semantic Web promises greater interoperability between software agents and Web services, enabling automatic content-based service discovery. However, the heterogeneity in the representation of knowledge represented by ontologies makes interaction between applications that use this knowledge difficult. 

On the other hand, the services produced and described by different developers may use different or perhaps partially overlapping sets of ontologies. Users may store their data in different structures and use different terms to represent the same concept. Therefore, in order to share information, when using heterogeneous vocabularies it must be possible to translate data from one ontology framework to another. The process of finding semantic correspondences between different ontologies is known as ontology alignment and is crucial for the success of the Semantic Web.