The PROMPT suite: interactive tools for ontology merging and mapping

• DOI: 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2003.08.002
• Publication Date: 2003-10-16T15:11:48Z
• Authors: Natalya F Noy; Mark A Musen
• Keywords: Ontology components; Open Biomedical Ontologies; IDEF5; Ontology engineering

Researchers in the ontology-design field have developed the content for ontologies in many domain areas. This distributed nature of ontology development has led to a large number of ontologies covering overlapping domains. In order for these ontologies to be reused, they first need to be merged or aligned to one another. We developed a suite of tools for managing multiple ontologies. These suite provides users with a uniform framework for comparing, aligning, and merging ontologies, maintaining versions, translating between different formalisms. Two of the tools in the suite support semi-automatic ontology merging: IPROMPT is an interactive ontology-merging tool that guides the user through the merging process, presenting him with suggestions for next steps and identifying inconsistencies and potential problems. ANCHORPROMPT uses a graph structure of ontologies to find correlation between concepts and to provide additional information for IPROMPT.