Progressive ontology alignment for meaning coordination: an information-theoretic foundation

We elaborate on the mathematical foundations of the meaning coordination problem that agents face in open environments. We investigate to which extend the BarwiseSeligman theory of information flow provides a faithful theoretical description of the partial semantic integration that two agents achieve as they progressively align their underlying ontologies through the sharing of tokens, such as instances. We also discuss the insights and practical implications of the Barwise-Seligman theory with respect to the general meaning coordination problem. Categories and Subject Descriptors I.2.11 [Artificial Intelligence]: Distributed Artificial Intelligence—coherence and coordination, multiagent systems; D.2.12 [Software Engineering]: Interoperability—data mapping; I.4.4 [Artificial Intelligence]: Knowledge Representation Formalisms and Methods—semantic networks, relation systems General Terms Theory Keywords Semantic interoperability, meaning coordination, ontologies, theory of inf...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: W. Marco Schorlemmer, Yannis Kalfoglou
• Keywords: ATAL 2005, General Meaning Coordination, Meaning Coordination Problem, Partial Semantic Integration