• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.33 no.9
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• pp.787-801
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• 2006

Ontology merging describes the process of integrating two ontologies into a new ontology. How this is done best is a subject of ongoing research in the Semantic Web, Data Integration, Knowledge Management System, and other ontology-related application systems. Earlier research on ontology merging, however, has studied for developing effective ontology matching approaches but missed analyzing and solving methods of problems of merging two ontologies given correspondences between them. In this paper, we propose a specific ontology merging process and a generic operator, T-MERGE, for integrating two source ontologies into a new ontology. Also, we define a taxonomy of merging conflicts which is derived from differing representations between input ontologies and a method for detecting and resolving them. Our T-MERGE operator encapsulates the process of detection and resolution of conflicts and merging two entities based on given correspondences between them. We define a data structure, MergeLog, for logging the execution of T-MERGE operator. MergeLog is used to inform detailed results of execution of merging to users or recover errors. For our experiments, we used oriental philosophy ontologies, western philosophy ontologies, Yahoo western philosophy dictionary, and Naver philosophy dictionary as input ontologies. Our experiments show that the automatic merging module compared with manual merging by a expert has advantages in terms of time and effort.