Generating and integrating evidence for ontology mappings

For more than a decade, ontologies have been proposed as a means to enable sharing and reuse of knowledge. While originally relatively narrow information landscapes have been in mind (e.g., knowledge sharing between a few expert systems) the application areas proposed nowadays (e.g., organizational knowledge management or the Semantic Web) are rather broad and open. From abstract considerations about the distributed nature of knowledge as well as from observation of actual (human) ontology negotiation processes it seems clear that globally agreed-upon conceptualizations are probably not obtainable. Therefore, ontology matching and mapping procedures play an essential role in more open information landscapes. In this paper, we present a framework that collects and integrates heuristic evidence for ontology mappings, allows a knowledge engineer to browse a space of (assessed) mapping candidates in order to select adequate candidates and then leverage them to a level of formal statements for ontology merging. A simple example session shows the intended handling of the prototype and demonstrates strengths and weaknesses of particular sources of matching evidence.