Putting things in context: a topological approach to mapping contexts to ontologies

Ontologies and contexts are complementary disciplines for modeling views. In the area of information integration, on-tologies may be viewed as the outcome of a manual ef-fort of modeling a domain, while contexts are system gen-erated models. In this work, we aim at formalizing the inter-relationships between a manually generated ontology and automatically generated contexts. We provide a formal mathematical framework that delineates the relationship be-tween contexts and ontologies. We then use the model to de-fine the uncertainty associated with automatic context extrac-tion from existing documents and provide a ranking method, which ranks ontology concepts according to their suitabil-ity with a given context. Throughout this work we motivate our research using QUALEG, a European IST project that aims at providing local government an effective tool for bi-directional communication with citizens