Ontology Matching Approaches in Semantic Web: A Survey

Ontology is a means to help computer agents in the process of automatic knowledge extraction. In this way, ontology can be considered as a key factor in semantic web development. However, it only moves the problem of handling decentralized and distributed information over the Web to a higher level due to the fact that building of ontologies is not based on a common criteria. For example, similar concepts in ontologies may be represented by different vocabularies. Ontology matching is a technique to map the different concepts among ontologies. Although different ontology matching techniques are successful in integrating heterogeneous ontologies, they introduce a new problem. Papers on ontology matching report the results on different frameworks and this makes their comparison almost impossible. Therefore, the main focus of this paper will be on providing some basics of ontology matching and briefly introducing its different approaches.