Target-driven merging of Taxonomies

Abstract: The proliferation of ontologies and taxonomies in many domains increasingly demands the integration of multiple such ontologies. The goal of ontology integration is to merge two or more given ontologies in order to provide a unified view on the input ontologies while maintaining all information coming from them. We propose a new taxonomy merging algorithm that, given as input two taxonomies and an equivalence matching between them, can generate an integrated taxonomy in a fully automatic manner. The approach is target-driven, i.e. we merge a source taxonomy into the target taxonomy and preserve the structure of the target ontology as much as possible. We also discuss how to extend the merge algorithm providing auxiliary information, like additional relationships between source and target concepts, in order to semantically improve the final result. The algorithm was implemented in a working prototype and evaluated using synthetic and real-world scenarios.