Ontology-based concept similarity in Formal Concept Analysis

Both domain ontologies and Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) aim at modeling concepts, although with different purposes. In the literature, a promising research area concerns the role of FCA in ontology engineering, in particular, in supporting the critical task of reusing independently developed domain ontologies. With this regard, the possibility of evaluating concept similarity; is acquiring an increasing relevance, since it allows the identification of different concepts that are semantically close. In this paper, an ontology-based method for assessing similarity between FCA concepts is proposed. Such a method is intended to support the ontology engineer in difficult activities that are becoming fundamental in the development of the Semantic Web, such us ontology merging and ontology mapping and, in particular, it can be used in parallel to existing semi-automatic tools relying on FCA. (C) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.