In order to tackle the need of sharing knowledge within and across organisational boundaries, the last decade has seen researchers both in academia and industry advocating for the use of ontologies as a means for providing a shared understanding of common domains. But with the generalised use of large distributed environments such as the World Wide Web came the proliferation of many di#erent ontologies, even for the same or similar domain, hence setting forth a new need of sharing---that of sharing ontologies. In addition, if visions such as the Semantic Web are ever going to become a reality, it will be necessary to provide as much automated support as possible to the task of mapping di#erent ontologies. Although many e#orts in ontology mapping have already been carried out, we have noticed that few of them are based on strong theoretical grounds and on principled methodologies. Furthermore, many of them are based only on syntactical criteria. In this paper we present a theory and method for automated ontology mapping based on channel theory, a mathematical theory of semantic information flow.

Ontology matching is currently a key technology to achieve the semantic alignment of ontological entities used by knowledge-based applications, and therefore to enable their interoperability in distributed environments such as multi-agent systems. Most ontology matching mechanisms, however, assume matching prior integration and rely on semantics that has been coded a priori in concept hierarchies or external sources. We present a formal model for a semantic alignment procedure that incrementally aligns differing conceptualisations of two or more agents relative to their respective perception of the environment or domain they are acting in. It hence makes the situation in which the alignment occurs explicit in the model. We resort to Channel Theory to carry out the formalisation. 1

Abstract. Ontology alignment foundations are hard to find in the literature. The abstract nature of the topic and the diverse means of practice make it difficult to capture it in a universal formal foundation. We argue that such a lack of formality hinders further development and convergence of practices, and in particular, prevents us from achieving greater levels of automation. In this article we present a formal foundation for ontology alignment that is based on interaction models between heterogeneous agents on the Semantic Web. We use the mathematical notion of information flow in a distributed system to ground our three hypotheses of enabling semantic interoperability and we use a motivating example throughout the article: how to progressively align two ontologies of research quality assessment through meaning coordination. We conclude the article with the presentation—in an executable specification language—of such an ontology-alignment interaction model. 1.

tland, in 2000. His research interest is focusing on ontologies, in particular ontology-based services in a variety of application areas. He has researched extensively the intersection of software and knowledge engineering with emphasis on intelligent support for the early stages of software design when working with knowledge models. He has published over 30 papers on this and similar subjects and recently his focus is on ontology mapping and merging technologies. He is an active member of the EU funded OntoWeb & KnowledgeWeb thematic networks of excellence where he is working on industry-strength ontology tools and environments. Our Research on Semantic Integration Our approach draws heavily on proven theoretical work but our work goes further in providing a systematic approach for ontology mapping with precise methodological steps. In particular, our method, InformationFlow based Ontology Mapping (IF-Map) [2], draws on the proven theoretical ground of Information Flow and channel t

We observe an ever growing need for integration in today's research agendas across a variety of organisations. The proliferation of ontologies and other similar knowledge-rich and labour-intensive structures as well as their exposure to a distributed environment like the Web, and eventually its successor, the Semantic Web, justifies the need. Although a plethora of solutions have been proposed and used, there are many issues which remain unclear. The most striking one is the antithesis in the availability of solutions for semantic integration as opposed to the abundance of techniques and methods for syntactic integration. In this paper we make the first step towards semantic integration by proposing a mathematically sound application of channel theory to enable semantic interoperability of separate ontologies representing similar domains. 1