Tech Reports

ULCS-09-010

Evaluating a Space Reduction Mechanism for the Dynamic Selection of Ontological Alignments

Paul Doran, Valentina Tamma, Terry R. Payne and Ignazio Palmisano

Abstract

Effective communication in open environments relies on the ability of agents to reach a mutual understanding of the exchanged message by reconciling the vocabulary (ontology) used. Various approaches have considered how mutually acceptable mappings between corresponding concepts in the agents’ ontologies may be determined dynamically through argumentation-based negotiation (such as Meaningbased Argumentation). However, the complexity of this process is high, reaching Pi^(p)_2 -complete in some cases. As reducing this complexity is non-trivial, we propose the use of ontology modularization as a means of reducing the space over which possible correspondences are negotiated. The suitability of different modularization approaches as filtering mechanisms for reducing the argumentation search space is investigated. We empirically demonstrate that some modularization approaches not only reduce the number of alignments required to reach consensus, but can also predict those cases where a service provider is unable to fully satisfy a request, without the need for argumentation.

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