Agent based Protégé plugin for ontology alignment

Ontologies are extensively used to strcuture the domain knowledge. Nowadays, with the large amount of ontologies already available, there is a high demand for reusing the knowledge in existing ontologies. Since ontologies are complex structures, sharing of knowledge coming from various ontologies has become a tedious task. Ontology alignment is a popular knowledge sharing technique that is used to share information between heterogeneous information systems. There are numerous techniques for the alignment of ontologies, and the field still faces many challenges. Due to the inherent nature of multiple relationships among the ontologies, it postulates that the Multi-Agent System technology is a better technology to automate the ontology alignment with little human intervention. This paper presents multi-agent based approach for ontology alignment developed as a plug in for the popular ontological modelling environment known as Protégé. It simulates how different processes interactively operate inside the human mind to perform certain activities intelligently. Indeed, the proposed solution uses agent communication, negotiation, and coordination as the primary method of exploring the semantic relationships between the ontologies. The generated ontology could be used as a shared understanding between information systems that are running on input ontologies. The success of the proposed approach was evaluated by using two ontologies of agricultural domain. It was evident that the system could discover over 70% accurate semantic relationships, and thus, the authors claim that the proposed approach could resolve the complexity in ontology alignment for certain extend.