Re: Cross-ontologies reasoning

Hello everyone.

Bill Andersen wrote:

> Say in ontology o1 you have
>
>   (x)[bachelor(x) <-> (male(x) & ~married(x))]
>
> and in ontology o2 you have
>
>   (x)[bachelor(x) <-> (male(x) & ~married(x) & age(x,y) & y<60)]
>
> But this only works in the o2->o1 direction and then only if there is 
> agreement on what 'male' and 'married' mean in each.  So, Rush 
> Limbaugh notwithstanding, you don't really get to pick which axioms 
> you don't care about because you don't know a priori which axioms the 
> *applications* attached to the ontologies you wish to merge do care 
> about and to what degree they care about them (e.g., can inconsistency 
> be tolerated as in a content management system like Semagix).

Can't we find a way of saying a bit more than that it only works in the 
o2->o1 direction? In fact, the two concepts seem somehow similar...

I'm not presently concerned with ontology merging techniques, but I'm 
working on a way to translate between ontologies (see 
http://we-b-mind.org/publications/o3f_aamas_2003.pdf), which is related. 
We still have not addressed the question of the axioms in the two 
ontologies, but we consider that concepts (classes, properties, etc) in 
two different ontologies can have different levels of 'translatability': 
strong, weak, approximate,..., depending on how strong the mapping 
between the concepts is... Couldn't this idea be extended to scenarios 
like the one you presented?

Bye, Luís

Received on Tuesday, 30 December 2003 12:29:42 UTC