PowerMap: Mapping the Real Semantic Web on the Fly

Ontology mapping plays an important role in bridging the semantic gap between distributed and heterogeneous data sources. As the Semantic Web slowly becomes real and the amount of online semantic data increases, a new generation of tools is developed that automatically find and integrate this data. Unlike in the case of earlier tools where mapping has been performed at the design time of the tool, these new tools require mapping techniques that can be performed at run time. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we investigate the general requirements for run time mapping techniques. Second, we describe our PowerMap mapping algorithm that was designed to be used at run-time by an ontology based question answering tool.