Ontology Alignment in Agent Systems: Current and future challenges

Solving heterogeneity problems on the semantic Web using ontologies is important for communicating agents requiring a shared understanding of common domains. Ontology alignment is one prerequisite towards enabling interoperability between agents or services that use different ontologies. It is necessary that these agents align their ontologies to enable data exchange at the syntactic and semantic level. This paper conducts a review of research in ontology alignment in an agent context and identifies the major theoretical and practical issues which need to be addressed. We also provide directions for future research in the area of ontology alignment in general