Tool support for the integration of light-weight ontologies

In many areas of computer science ontologies become more and more important. The use of ontologies for domain modeling often brings up the issue of ontology integration. The task of merging several ontologies, covering specific subdomains, into one unified ontology has to be solved. Many approaches for ontology integration aim at automating the process of ontology alignment. However, a complete automation is not feasible, and user interaction is always required. Nevertheless, most ontology integration tools offer only very limited support for the interactive part of the integration process. In this paper, we present a novel approach for the interactive integration of ontologies. The result of the ontology integration is incrementally updated after each definition of a correspondence between ontology elements. The user is guided through the ontologies to be integrated. By restricting the possible user actions, the integrity of all defined correspondences is ensured by the tool we developed. We evaluated our tool by integrating different regulations concerning building design. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.