A Layered Declarative Approach to Ontology Translation with Knowledge Preservation

Book excerpt: The ontology translation problem (aka ontology interoperability problem) appears when we decide to reuse an ontology (or part of an ontology) with a tool or language that is different from those ones in which the ontology is available. If we force each ontology-based system developer, individually, to commit to the task of translating and incorporating to their systems the ontologies that they need, they will require a lot of effort and time to achieve their objective. This book presents two contributions to the current state of the art on ontology translation among languages and/or tools. The first contribution is a proposal for a new model for building and maintaining ontology translation systems. The second contribution characterises existing ontology translation approaches from the perspectives of semantic and pragmatic preservation, that is, consequence and intended meaning preservation respectively.