Ontology Mapping in Pervasive Computing Environment

Ontology provides a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization of a domain. It enables knowledge sharing in open and dynamic distributed systems. Using ontology, devices can understand the messages without prior knowledge about the format or content of the messages. It also allows devices not expressly designed to work together to interoperate. In this paper, we propose an online ontology mapping mechanism for facing up to new challenges in ontology mapping in pervasive computing environment. Our proposed design takes similarities of the names, properties and relationships of concepts into consideration during mapping. It outperforms the previous source-based and instance-based approaches in terms of efficiency as it does not require finding a one-to-one corresponding mapping of concepts between two ontologies. It can also use history records to store the information about the instances instead of storing all the instances which is more space efficient than traditional instance-based ontology mapping. This research is partly supported by HKU Large Equipment Grant 01021001 and Hong Kong RGC Grant HKU-7519/03E.link_to_subscribed_fulltex