A Method of Identifying Ontology Domain

Metadata, such as the domain description and the purpose of an ontology, can be used to describe the context of ontologies for ontology integration. However, these metadata are not always available in ontologies. To solve the problem, a method is developed to automatically discern the domain of an ontology. This method uses a so-called core domain ontology, rules and an ontology reasoner to identify the domain. The core domain ontology is a light weight ontology that consists of the essential concepts of a domain. Rules and the ontology reasoner are used to test if the core domain ontology is consistent with an ontology for which the domain needs to be identified. If the two ontologies are not in violation, then the method confirms the consistency between them, that is, the test ontology shares the same domain as the core domain ontology. If the core domain ontology shows inconsistency with the test ontology, they do not share the same domain and then the ontology can be used to compare with another core domain ontology. Experiments on the core domain ontology for the conference domain show good results. Ten ontologies of mixed domains are compared with the core conference ontology. Eight ontologies’ domain are correctly identified, out of which, four ontologies are identified as sharing the same ontology domain.