IF-Map: An Ontology-Mapping Method Based on Information-Flow Theory

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 different 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 different ontologies. Although many efforts 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. We successfully applied our method to a large-scale scenario involving the mapping of several different ontologies of computer-science departments from various UK universities.