Towards Ontological Blending

We propose ontological blending as a new method for `creatively' combining ontologies. In contrast to other combination techniques that aim at integrating or assimilating categories and relations of thematically closely related ontologies, blending aims at `creatively' generating new categories and ontological definitions on the basis of input ontologies whose domains are thematically distinct but whose specifications share structural or logical properties. As a result, ontological blending can generate new ontologies and concepts and allows a more flexible technique for ontology combination than existing methods. The approach is inspired by conceptual blending in cognitive science, and draws on methods from ontological engineering, algebraic specification, and computational creativity in general. Well-known techniques directed towards unifying the semantic content of different ontologies, namely techniques based on matching, aligning, or connecting ontologies, are ill-suited...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: AIMSA
• Authors: Joana Hois, Oliver Kutz, Till Mossakowski, John A. Bateman
• Keywords: AIMSA 2010, Artificial Intelligence, Blending, Ontological Blending, Ontologies