The IFF Foundation for Ontological Knowledge Organization
This work addresses the challenge of organizing and integrating ontologies for applications in digital libraries and distributed databases, representing an incremental extension of existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of integrating ontologies by proposing a two-step process of alignment and unification, extending a previous information flow approach to first-order logic within the Information Flow Framework (IFF).
This paper discusses an axiomatic approach for the integration of ontologies, an approach that extends to first order logic a previous approach (Kent 2000) based on information flow. This axiomatic approach is represented in the Information Flow Framework (IFF), a metalevel framework for organizing the information that appears in digital libraries, distributed databases and ontologies (Kent 2001). The paper argues that the integration of ontologies is the two-step process of alignment and unification. Ontological alignment consists of the sharing of common terminology and semantics through a mediating ontology. Ontological unification, concentrated in a virtual ontology of community connections, is fusion of the alignment diagram of participant community ontologies - the quotient of the sum of the participant portals modulo the ontological alignment structure.