Ontology Mapping: The State of the Art

Abstract

Ontology mapping is seen as a solution provider in today's landscape of ontology
research. As the number of ontologies that are made publicly available and
accessible on the Web increases steadily, so does the need for applications to use
them. A single ontology is no longer enough to support the tasks envisaged by a 
distributed environment like the Semantic Web. Multiple ontologies need to be 
accessed from several applications. Mapping could provide a common layer from which
several ontologies could be accessed and hence could exchange information in 
semantically sound manners. Developing such mapping has beeb the focus of a variety
of works originating from diverse communities over a number of years. In this
article we comprehensively review and present these works. We also provide insights
on the pragmatics of ontology mapping and elaborate on a theoretical approach for
defining ontology mapping.