An Approach to Owl Concept Extraction and Integration Across Multiple Ontologies

Increase in number of ontologies on Semantic Web and endorsement of OWL as language of discourse for the Semantic Web has lead to a scenario where research efforts in the field of ontology engineering may be applied for making the process of ontology development through reuse a viable option for ontology developers. The advantages are twofold as when existing ontological artefacts from the Semantic Web are reused, semantic heterogeneity is reduced and help in interoperability which is the essence of Semantic Web. From the perspective of ontology development advantages of reuse are in terms of cutting down on cost as well as development life as ontology engineering requires expert domain skills and is time taking process. We have devised a framework to address challenges associated with reusing ontologies from the Semantic Web. In this paper we present methods adopted for extraction and integration of concepts across multiple ontologies. We have based extraction method on features of OWL language constructs and context to extract concepts and for integration a relative semantic similarity measure is devised. We also present here guidelines for evaluation of ontology constructed. The proposed methods have been applied on concepts from food ontology and evaluation has been done on concepts from domain of academics using Golden Ontology Evaluation Method with satisfactory outcomes.