Tools for Mapping and Merging Ontologies

Researchers in the ontology-design field have developed the content for ontologies in many domain areas. This distributed nature of ontology development has led to a large number of ontologies covering overlapping domains. In order for these ontologies to be reused, they first need to be merged or aligned to one another. We developed a set of tools to support semi-automatic ontology merging: iPrompt is an interactive ontology merging tool that guides the user through the merging process, presenting him with suggestions for next steps and identifying inconsistencies and potential problems. AnchorPrompt uses a graph structure of ontologies to find correlation between concepts and to provide additional information for iPrompt. we present the tools and results of our evaluation of the tools. We discuss other tools and approaches for mapping between ontologies, both in the field of ontology design and database-schema integration.