Making Ontologies Talk: Knowledge Interoperability in the Semantic Web

Ontologies offer shared vocabularies that are key to agent cooperation and knowledge systems integration as well as fundamental to the Semantic Web. As the number of ontologies increases, so does the need for new tools and techniques to establish agreement between different knowledge representatuions. Six essays based on papers accepted for the First Workshop on Ontology Alignment and Visualization (OnAV 2008) exemplify some of the ways researchers are extending the state of the art in algorithms that can establish correspondences between different but related onologies.