Merging taxonomies under RCC-5 algebraic articulations

  • Authors:

  • David Thau;Shawn Bowers;Bertram Ludäscher

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California, Davis, CA, USA;University of California, Davis, CA, USA;University of California, Davis, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2nd international workshop on Ontologies and information systems for the semantic web
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Taxonomies are widely used to classify information, and multiple (possibly competing) taxonomies often exist for the same domain. Given a set of correspondences between two taxonomies, it is often necessary to "merge" the taxonomies, thereby creating a unified taxonomy (e.g., that can then be used by data integration and discovery applications). We present an algorithm for merging taxonomies that have been related using articulations given as RCC-5 constraints. Two taxa N and M can be related using (disjunctions of) the five base relations in RCC-5: N a M; N -- M; N -- M; N -- M (partial overlap of N and M); and N ! M (disjointness: N ) M = Ø). RCC-5 is increasingly being adopted by scientists to specify mappings between large species taxonomies. We discuss the properties of the proposed merge algorithm and evaluate our approach using real-world biological taxonomies.