2008 Volume E91.D Issue 11 Pages 2616-2625
In order to timely response to a user query at run-time, next generation Semantic Web applications demand a robust mechanism to dynamically select one or more existing ontologies available on the Web and combine them automatically if needed. Although existing ontology retrieval systems return a lengthy list of resultant ontologies, they cannot identify which ones can completely meet the query requirements nor determine a minimum set of resultant ontologies that can jointly satisfy the requirements if no single ontology is available to satisfy them. Therefore, this paper presents an ontology retrieval system, namely combiSQORE, which can return single or combinative ontologies that completely satisfy a submitted query when the available ontology database is adequate to answer such query. In addition, the proposed system ranks the returned results based on their semantic similarities to the given query and their modification (integration) costs. The experimental results show that combiSQORE system yields practical combinative ontologies and useful rankings.