Ontology Translation on the Semantic Web

Abstract. Ontologies are a crucial tool for formally specifying the vocabulary and relationship of concepts used on the Semantic Web. In order to share information, agents that use different vocabularies must be able to translate data from one ontological framework to another. Ontology translation is required when translating datasets, generating ontology extensions, and querying through different ontologies. OntoMerge, an online system for ontology merging and automated reasoning, can implement ontology translation with inputs and outputs in OWL or other web languages. Ontology translation can be thought of in terms of formal inference in a merged ontology. The merge of two related ontologies is obtained by taking the union of the concepts and the axioms defining them, and then adding bridging axioms that relate their concepts. The resulting merged ontology then serves as an inferential medium within which translation can occur. Our internal representation, Web-PDDL, is a strong typed first-order logic language for web application. Using a uniform notation for all problems allows us to factor out syntactic and semantic translation problems, and focus on the latter. Syntactic translation is done by an automatic translator between Web-PDDL and OWL or other web languages. Semantic translation is implemented using an inference engine (OntoEngine) which processes assertions and queries in Web-PDDL syntax, running in either a data-driven (forward chaining) or demand-driven (backward chaining) way.