Context Discovery via Theory Interpretation

We report on ongoing work to apply techniques of automated theory morphism search to ontology matching and alignment problems. Such techniques are able to discover ‘structural similarities’ across different ontologies by providing theory interpretations of one ontology into another. In particular, we discuss two such scenarios: one where the signatures and logics of the component ontologies fit enough to directly translate one ontology into the other, called stringent contexts, and one where we need to lift the ontologies to first-order logic, possibly extended by definitonal axioms introducing extra non-logical symbols, called conforming contexts. We also sketch the techniques currently available for automating the task of finding theory interpretations in first-order logic and discuss possible extensions.