Resolution of conflicts among ontology mappings : a fuzzy approach

Interoperability is a strong requirement in open distributed systems and in the Semantic Web. The need for ontology integration is not always completely met by the available ontology matching techniques because, in most cases, the semantics of the compared ontologies is not considered, thus leading to inconsistent mappings. Probabilistic approaches has been proposed to validate mappings and solve the inconsistencies, based on a mapping confidence measure. As probabilistic approaches suffer from the lack of well-founded likelihood measures of mapping correctness, we propose a validation approach based on fuzzy interpretation of mappings, which better models the notion of degree of similarity between ontology elements. Moreover, we describe a conflict resolution method which computes the minimal sets of conflicting mappings and can be the ground of different validation strategies.