CONTENTS

KNOWLEDGE ENGINEERING: PRINCIPLES AND TECHNIQUES
Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Engineering,
Principles and Techniques, KEPT2009
Cluj-Napoca (Romania), July 2–4, 2009, pp. 219–222
A FORMAL CONCEPT ANALYSIS APPROACH TO ONTOLOGY
SEARCH
IOAN ALFRED LETIA (1) AND MIHAI COSTIN (2)
Abstract. Finding the most suited ontology for a given domain or problem is
not an easy task but through our work here we are trying to ease this endeavor
by providing a semiautomated search mechanism. Semiautomated, because we
need our search target to be defined by an expert. Once that target defined, by
combining the processing power of MAS with FCA, we analyse the search space
in order to find the most compatible ontology with the initial target.
1. Motivation and Goal
The main step for solving a certain problem has always been finding or creating
the best tool for the job at hand, no matter what the domain was.
In information science, our domain of interest, the tool in question is an ontology
capable of mapping the problem domain with success. Finding the right ontology for
a certain task has been even from the begining one of the theoretical strong-points
of the semantic web but things are not as easy as it seems [8]. The right ontology is
never easy to find and creating one is even harder.
This, without any doubt, involves some sort of intelligent ontology search, a
guided search that has an array of ontologies as search space. For this paper, we are
using a predefined set of existing ontologies as search space. The process and the
results themself can later on be applied to a larger scale, all being reduced afterwards
to a scalability problem.
We mentioned guided search because our process starts from a well defined domain.
This domain must be described by some expert in the field using a set of
concepts, concepts that will represent the search target. Our system uses this set
of concepts in order to find the best suited ontology by expanding and matching it
against the concepts found in the search space.
2. Proposed Solution
Having the initial domain defined by an expert in the field, as to direct our search,
the search agents can then start trying to find the concepts that match the initial set.
2000 Mathematics Subject Classification. 68T30, 94A15.
Key words and phrases. Ontology, Formal Concept Analisys, Multiagent Systems, Search
methods.
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c○2009 Babe¸s-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca