Toward analyzing impact of disjoint axioms for merging heterogeneous ontologies

In recent years, the question on Automatic Ontology Merging (AOM) become challenging to address for the researchers. Our research and development for the Disjoint Knowledge Perservation based Automatic Ontology Merging (DKP-AOM) is a milestone in the same direction. This paper provides a more specific discussion about disjoint knowledge axioms in DKP-AOM and makes an assessment of our merge algorithm that looks-up within disjoint partitions of concept hierarchies of ontologies. The significant use of disjoint knowledge is corroborated by testing conference and vertebrate ontologies. The results reveal that disjoint knowledge axioms help identifying initial inaccurate mappings and remove ambiguity when the concept with same symbolic identifier has a different meaning in different local ontologies in the process of ontology merging. Disjoint axioms separate the knowledge in distinct chunks and enable concept matching within the boundaries of sub-hierarchies of the entire ontology concept hierarchy. While finding matches between concepts of ontologies, disjoint partitions with the disjoint knowledge about concepts in source ontologies minimize the search space and reduce the runtime complexity of ontology merging. We also discuss encouraging results obtained by our DKP-AOM system within the OAEI 2015 campaign.