A Conflict-based Operator for Mapping Revision

Ontology matching is one of the key research topics in the field of the Semantic Web. There are many matching systems that generate mappings between different ontologies either automatically or semiautomatically. However, the mappings generated by these systems may be inconsistent with the ontologies. Several approaches have been proposed to deal with the inconsistencies between mappings and ontologies. This problem is often called a mapping revision problem because we give priority to ontologies when resolving inconsistencies. In this paper, we first propose a conflict-based mapping revision operator and show that it can be characterized by a logical postulate. We then provide an iterative algorithm for mapping revision by using an ontology revision operator and show that this algorithm defines a conflict-based mapping revision operator. Three concrete ontology revision operators are given to instantiate the iterative algorithm, which result in three different mapping revision algorithms. We implement these algorithms and provide some preliminary but interesting evaluation results.