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Conversion techniques: notes

'Ontology mapping' is correctly seen as one of the major issues currently to be addressed in ontology research, development and application.

Ontology mapping refers to the problem of relating different ontologies to one another. The ontologies may be different because they have been developed by different groups, they may be different because they address a problem area from different perspectives, or they may be different because they are pitched at different levels of abstraction or generality. The latter subproblem is found particularly when one is attempting to relate 'upper' ontologies with 'lower', or domain/application-specific ontologies.

Many different groups are working on various aspects of the ontology mapping problem. There are very general theoretical approaches that are seeking foundations for all such mappings, such as the Information Flow Framework (IFF) . There are very specific mappings undertaken for application-near resources, such as the linking of the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) with WordNet synsets, and the general combination of ontologies in the Multiple Source Ontology (MSO) effort. Here we are more concerned with TOOLs and techniques.

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