Ontology Meta-Matching

The problem of ontology alignment can be described as follows: given two ontologies that describe a set of discrete entities (which can be classes, properties, rules, predicates) it is the process of finding semantic correspondences between them in an automatic way and without needing human intervention, for example, equivalence or belonging.

Ontology alignment a.k.a. ontology matching is a very useful process within the Semantic Web. It can be applied to intelligent agent technology in order to enable them to collect and integrate information from different sources, as well as to search for services on the Web and use them automatically without user intervention. For e-commerce, where ontologies play an important role, information from different and heterogeneous companies can be integrated, unifying descriptions of products, processes, transactions, etc. In addition to all this, the possibility of automating many processes, by providing data with a formal semantics, understandable by machines, is a great contribution. For example, applications from different companies could work automatically with different data sources, even comparing between different ontologies, to transfer or exchange information between them without having to agree beforehand on the meaning of the data.