Ontology Merging: Compatible and Incompatible Ontology Mappings

Ontology mappings are used in data integration, query answering, and comparative analysis tasks of ontologies. Ontology mappings are often obtained by using a matching tool. Ontology merging is the creation of a new ontology from at least two source ontologies. In Ontology merging, establishing map-pings between source ontologies is the primitive step. Ontology matching tools can be used for establishing mappings, but different matching tools often give dissimilar ontology mappings. Human intervention may not solve the problem because distinct perspectives and understandings also lead to different mappings. Attempts to face the problems have been studied in the literature. All these attempts focus on finding erroneous mappings and finding one consensual mapping. In this paper, we suggest that under some conditions, mappings can be combined to get benefits from each of them. Mappings satisfying those conditions are name compatible mappings, we argue that the conditions mentioned above are based on Galois connections. Opposed to compatible mappings, incompatible mappings cannot be combined because their combination results in erroneous mappings. We discussed our method in the context of ontology merging.