Ontology Merging Using Prompt Plug-In of Protégé in Semantic Web

An integral component of the Semantic Web is the notion of an Ontology. Ontologies which are a means for conceptualizing and structuring knowledge play a key role in the realization of semantic web´s vision of incorporating the machine-understandable data on the current human-readable web. Ontology Management involves various key issues like: Ontology creation or reuse, merging, matching or mapping etc. Due to the exceeding number and wide range of Ontologies day by day, there is a need of higher level of abstraction that enables information fusion across multiple Ontologies which is possible by merging various source Ontologies to form a new and larger Ontology which may replace the earlier ontologies. Ontologies that need to be merged may be similar in some aspects and different in others which is a major challenge for semantic web applications. Ontology merging refers to a process of taking two or more source ontologies and return a merged ontology based on the given source ontologies. There is a need to merge a set of all conceptual based information and physical merging at attribute level in all Ontologies without any redundancy and taking care of alignment and mapping factors or any other significant issues which may be time consuming or a challenging complex task. Various approaches, tools and techniques are being applied for this purpose. This paper highlights the merging process and it´s key issues and illustrates it with an example of merging two ontologies using prompt plug-in of protégé.