Session-based Ontology Alignment

In recent years many ontologies have been developed. The benefits of using ontologies include reuse, sharing and portability of knowledge across platforms, and improved documentation, maintenance, and reliability. Ontologies lead to a better understanding of a field and to more effective and efficient handling of information in that field. Many of the currently developed ontologies contain overlapping information. For instance, Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies lists circa 40 different ontologies in the anatomy domain (April 2012). Often we want to use multiple ontologies. For instance, applications may need to use ontologies from different areas or from different views on one area. Further, the data in different data sources in the same domain may have been annotated with different but similar ontologies. Knowledge of the interontology relationships would in this case lead to improvements in search, integration and analysis of data. It has been realized that this is a major issue and much research has recently been done on ontology alignment, i.e. finding mappings between terms in different ontologies.