BibSonomy publications for /user/eswc2008/mapping descriptionWed May 28 14:49:55 CEST 2008Berlin, HeidelbergProceedings of the 5th European Semantic Web ConferenceJuneLNCSMapping Validation by Probabilistic Reasoning2008matching mapping probabilistic logics description ontology reasoning formal-languages-1 In the semantic web environment, where two or more independent ontologies can be used in order to describe knowledge and data, ontologies have to be aligned by defining mappings among the elements of one ontology and the elements of another ontology. Very often, mappings are not derived by the semantics of the ontologies that are compared, but, rather, by an evaluation of the similarity of the terminology used in the two ontologies or of their syntactic structure. Moreover, ontology mappings can be inaccurate, because ontology matching tools derive such mappings from inaccurate terminology or even because they are not specifically tailored for the domain at hand. In this paper, we propose a new mapping validation approach for interpreting similarity-based mappings as semantic relations, by coping also with inaccuracy situations. The idea is to see two independent ontologies as a unique distributed knowledge base and to assume a semantic interpretation of ontology mappings as probabilistic and hypothetical relations among ontology elements. We present and use a probabilistic reasoning tool in order to validate mappings and to possibly infer new relations among the ontologies.