An Approach for Multiple Combination of Ontologies Based on the Ants Colony Optimization Algorithm

The combination of ontologies is a necessary activity nowadays. The fast growing of ontologies requires efficient processes to perform integrations. Before of the combination, the ontology comparisons (alignment) allow to have a reference of their similarities. The alignment established among ontologies allows defining individual correspondences between their concepts, based on measures of lexical or structural similarities. Normally the alignment is studied among whole of the concepts of two ontologies. But we could have the alignments from an objective ontology toward several ontologies, and to think in the best alignment for each concept, so a multiple combination of ontologies, in order to get the biggest benefit or enrichment in the objective ontology, can be made. This problem can be approached as an optimization one. This problem is studied in this paper, and we propose to apply the Ants colony algorithm to the process of analyzing the multiple ontology combinations, which is a contribution to the ontology integration processes.