Dynamic selection of ontological alignments: a space reduction mechanism

Abstract

Effective communication in open environments relies on the ability of <i>agents</i> to reach a mutual understanding of the exchanged message by reconciling the vocabulary (<i>ontology</i>) used. Various approaches have considered how mutually acceptable mappings between corresponding concepts in the agents' own ontologies may be determined dynamically through argumentation-based negotiation (such as <i>Meaning-based Argumentation</i>). However, the complexity of this process is high, approaching Π<sub>2</sub><sup>(p)</sup>-complete in some cases. As reducing this complexity is non-trivial, we propose the use of ontology modularization as a means of reducing the space over which possible concepts are negotiated. The suitability of different modularization approaches as filtering mechanisms for reducing the negotiation search space is investigated, and a framework that integrates modularization with Meaning-based Argumentation is proposed. We empirically demonstrate that some modularization approaches not only reduce the number of alignments required to reach consensus, but also predict those cases where a service provider is unable to fully satisfy a request, without the need for negotiation.