An approach of refining the merged ontology

In recent years, many domain ontologies have been developed and many of these ontologies contain overlapping or incompatible information. As systems that rely on domain ontologies expand, they often need to merge domain ontologies into a more general ontology. However, introducing ontology merging may cause redundancies and inconsistencies, which will break the soundness and balance of the original ontologies. In this paper we present an approach to refine the merged ontology. First the related process of ontologies merging is presented. Then, the refinement approach to the merged ontology is proposed including ontology pruning and ontology consistency checking. Further, the proposed approach is exemplified combing two example ontologies.