Uncertain Reasoning in Multi-agent Ontology Mapping on the Semantic Web

The increasing number of ontologies of the semantic Web poses new challenges for ontology mapping. In the context of question answering there is a need for good mapping algorithms which efficiently can perform syntactic and semantic mappings between classes and class properties from different ontologies. Mapping algorithms without the help of human experts are in particular desirable when the answer comes from different domain specific databases or ontologies. One of the main problems with any mapping process is that it always has a certain degree of uncertainty associated with it. In this paper we propose a framework based on agents performing mappings and combining beliefs of each individual agent using the Dempster-Shafer rule of combination. We also discuss the problems which can be encountered if we have conflicting beliefs between agents in a particular mapping.