Toward OWL Restriction Reconciliation in Merging Knowledge

Merging ontologies is the standard way to achieve interoperability of heterogeneous systems in the Semantic Web.
Because of the possibility of different modeling, OWL restrictions from one ontology may not necessarily be compatible with those from other ontologies. Thus, the merged ontology can suffer from restriction conflicts. This problem so far has got little attention. We propose a workflow to detect and resolve the OWL restriction conflicts within the merged ontology. We reconcile “one type” conflicts by building a subsumption hierarchy. We tackle cardinality restriction conflicts with least upper and greatest lower bound methods. By utilizing the semantic relatedness between two classes, we overcome value restriction conflicts.