ABSTRACT
Ontologies have been established for knowledge sharing and are widely used as a means for conceptually structuring domains of agriculture. With the growing usage of ontologies, the problem of overlapping knowledge in agricultural domain occurs more often and becomes critical. Agricultural ontologies are modeled by multiple authors in multiple settings. These ontologies lay the foundation for building new agricultural ontologies by assembling and extending multiple ontologies from repositories. The process of ontology merging takes as input two source ontologies and returns a merged ontology based on the given source ontologies. Manual ontology merging using conventional editing tools without support is difficult, labor intensive and error prone. Therefore, several systems and frameworks for supporting the knowledge engineer in the ontology merging task have recently been proposed. These works exploit linguistic, structural, domain knowledge and matching heuristics. Although some of them aim to exploit all types of knowledge and further capture the intended meanings of terms, these approaches do not offer a mathematic description of the merging process. We propose the novelty algorithm for merging ontologies following a matrix formal calculation which offers a mathematic description of the merging process. For the source ontologies, it constructs a oneone mapping to a matrix, thus ontologies' merging is converted to the matrix's calculation. After defining a novelty matrix formal calculation, the ontology merging is implemented successfully. We give the relationship between ontology and matrix in Section 2. In Section 3 the ontology merging algorithm is presented. In Section 4 we give an experiment to show how the algorithm implements .Section 5 summarizes the paper and concludes with an outlook on future work.
