Ontology mapping is seen as a solution provider in today's landscape of ontology research. As the number of ontologies that are made publicly available and accessible on the Web increases steadily, so does the need for applications to use them. A single ontology is no longer enough to support the tasks envisaged by a distributed environment like the Semantic Web. Multiple ontologies need to be accessed from several applications. Mapping could provide a common layer from which several ontologies could be accessed and hence could exchange information in semantically sound manners. Developing such mappings has been the focus of a variety of works originating from diverse communities over a number of years. In this article we comprehensively review and present these works. We also provide insights on the pragmatics of ontology mapping and elaborate on a theoretical approach for defining ontology mapping.

This paper presents a specifically database-inspired approach (called DOGMA) for engineering formal ontologies, implemented as shared resources used to express agreed formal semantics for a real world domain. We address several related key issues, such as knowledge reusability and shareability, scalability of the ontology engineering process and methodology, efficient and effective ontology storage and management, and coexistence of heterogeneous rule systems that surround an ontology mediating between it and application agents. Ontologies should represent a domain's semantics independently from "language", while any process that creates elements of such an ontology must be entirely rooted in some (natural) language, and any use of it will necessarily be through a (in general an agent's computer) language. To achieve the claims stated, we explicitly decompose ontological resources into ontology bases in the form of simple binary facts called lexons and into socalled ontological commitments in the form of description rules and constraints. Ontology bases in a logic sense, become "representationless " mathematical objects which constitute the range of a classical interpretation mapping from a first order language, assumed to lexically represent the commitment or binding of an application or task to such an ontology base. Implementations of ontologies become database-like on-line resources in the model-theoretic sense. The resulting architecture allows to materialize the (crucial) notion of commitment as a separate layer of (software agent) services, mediating between the ontology base and those application instances that commit to the ontology. We claim it also leads to methodological approaches that naturally extend key aspects of database modeling theory and practice. We discuss examples of the prototype DOGMA implementation of the ontology base server and commitment server.

Ontologies play a key role in the advent of the Semantic Web. An important problem when dealing with ontologies is the modification of an existing ontology in response to a certain need for change. This problem is a complex and multifaceted one, because it can take several different forms and includes several related subproblems, like heterogeneity resolution or keeping track of ontology versions. As a result, it is being addressed by several different, but closely related and often overlapping research disciplines. Unfortunately, the boundaries of each such discipline are not clear, as the same term is often used with different meanings in the relevant literature, creating a certain amount of confusion. The purpose of this paper is to identify the exact relationships between these research areas and to determine the boundaries of each field, by performing a broad review of the relevant literature.

Abstract. Semantic interoperability has become a key issue for realizing the Semantic Web in its full potential. However, there is a lot of controversy regarding the meaning and scope of the term and scarce formal approaches to the problem of semantic heterogeneity. In this paper, we discuss these approaches and propose a formalisation of semantic interoperability based on the Barwise-Seligman theory of information flow. We argue for a theoretical framework that favours the analysis and implementation of semantic interoperability scenarios. We present an example case of such a scenario where our framework has been applied as well as variations of it in the domain of ontology mapping. 1

This paper describes a prototype system for registering geologic data sets through ontologies to assist in integrating and querying heterogeneous geologic data sets. The system consists of three components: an ontology repository, the data set registration, and ontology-aware applications. User-defined ontologies in OWL are saved and used by the system. Each data set must be registered before it becomes available, and the registration semi-automatically generates a mapping from data sets to ontologies. The mapping between data sets and ontologies are used by applications to explore and extract information from the data set.

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Abstract. This paper unifies and/or generalizes several approaches to information, including the information flow of Barwise and Seligman, the formal conceptual analysis of Wille, the lattice of theories of Sowa, the categorical general systems theory of Goguen, and the cognitive semantic theories of Fauconnier, Turner, Gärdenfors, and others. Its rigorous approach uses category theory to achieve independence from any particular choice of representation, and institutions to achieve independence from any particular choice of logic. Corelations and colimits provide a general formalization of information integration, and Grothendieck constructions extend this to several kinds of heterogeneity. Applications include modular programming, Curry-Howard isomorphism, database semantics, ontology alignment, cognitive semantics, and more. 1

Interoperability is a crucial problem for geographic information systems. The transfer of data and models between different systems requires the ability to set up a correspondence between concepts in one system to concepts in the other. Concept matching is helped by ontologies. However, the challenge of making ontologies themselves interoperable continues. In other words, given two geo-ontologies, the basic question is: to which degree are these two geo-ontologies interoperable? In this paper, we consider that a geo-ontology describes things that can be assigned to locations on the surface of the Earth and relations between these things. A geo-ontology has concepts that correspond to physical and social phenomena in the real world. We suggest a classification of these concepts based on their use for describing geo-objects. We present a basic set of concepts for a geographical ontology, based on descriptions of the physical world and of the social reality. We also present a framework for measuring the degree of interoperability between geo-ontologies. We consider that this problem is a special case of Bernstein’s model management algebra for metadata descriptions. We propose to use a matching operator for measuring

Abstract — We present a new approach to the classification of reproducers based on an affordance theory of reproductive behaviour. First, we define the notion of an affordance as an action that one object in an environment can perform for another object. Using this ontology we can classify the reproducer space according to the presence (or absence) of a self-description and/or reproductive machinery. We give examples of how various reproducers (both natural and artificial) can be categorised, and show how this ontology can be used to separate trivial from non-trivial examples of reproduction. With a worked example we show how we might use this approach to classify computer viruses, and gain insight into their reproductive reliance on external agency. Finally, we conjecture that reproduction requires a self-description and a reproductive mechanism, whether it is supplied from within or from an external agent. I.