Using agent technology for Ontology alignment

Abstract

In the agricultural domain, different authorities have already developed their own ontologies and maintain them locally. However, for semantic tools to use these ontologies effectively on distributed environments, ontologies should be shared and aligned. Ontology alignment is an ontology mapping technique, which is used for sharing and reusing the content of disparate source of ontologies. Aligning dynamic and distributed ontologies turn out to be a research challenge for many decades. This paper discusses the complexity of the ontology alignment process and presents how the agent technology can be used to align dynamic ontologies in distributed environments. Our solution is inspired by how group of farmers communicate, negotiate, and coordinate to reach in common agreements. Our system is successfully used to align two dynamic ontologies describing agricultural crops.