An Approach to Ontology Integration for Ontology Reuse
in Knowledge Based Digital Ecosystems
Enrico G. Caldarola
Department of Electrical
Engineering and Information
Technologies, University of
Naples Federico II
Via Claudio, 21
Napoli, Italy
Institute of Industrial
Technologies and Automation,
National Research Council
Via P. Lembo, 38F
Bari, Italy
enricogiacinto.
caldarola@unina.it
ABSTRACT
In the last years, the large availability of information and
knowledge models formalized by ontologies has demanded
effective and efficient methodologies for reusing and inte-
grating such models in global conceptualizations of a spe-
cific knowledge or application domain. The ability to effec-
tively and efficiently perform knowledge reuse is a crucial
factor in the development of ontologies, which are a poten-
tial solution to the problem of information standardization
and a viaticum towards the realization of knowledge-based
digital ecosystem. In this paper, an approach to ontology
reuse based on heterogeneous matching techniques will be
presented; in particular, we will show how the process of
ontology building will be improved and simplified, by au-
tomating the selection and the reuse of existing data models
to support the creation of digital ecosystems. The proposed
approach has been applied to the food domain, specifically
to food production.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.4 [Information Systems Applications]: Miscellaneous;
D.2.8 [Software Engineering]: Metrics—complexity mea-
sures, performance measures; I.2.4 [Computing Method-
ologies]: Artificial IntelligenceKnowledge Representation For-
malisms and Methods[Semantic networks]
General Terms
Algorithms, Design
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MEDES’15 October 25-29, 2015, Caraguatatuba/Sao Paulo, Brazil
© 2015 ACM. ISBN 978-1-4503-3480-8/15/10…$15.00
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2857218.2857219
Antonio Picariello Antonio M. Rinaldi
Department of Electrical Department of Electrical
Engineering and Information
Engineering and Information
Technologies, University of
Technologies, University of
Naples Federico II Naples Federico II
Via Claudio, 21 Via Claudio, 21
Napoli, Italy IKNOS-LAB Intelligent and
antonio.picariello@unina.it Knowledge Systems,
University of Naples Federico
II, LUPT
Via Toledo, 402
Napoli, Italy
antoniomaria.
rinaldi@unina.it
1. INTRODUCTION
The term ontology, originally introduced by Aristotle, has
become today a buzzword among computer scientists, while
ontologies are considered as the silver bullet for the realiza-
tion of the Semantic Web vision [3]. According to Gruber
[14], an ontology is a specification of a shared conceptualiza-
tion of a domain, i.e., a formal definition and representation
of the concepts and their relations belonging to a certain
domain of interest. Once a knowledge domain or some as-
pects of it are formally represented using a common and
shared language, they become understandable not only by
humans but also by automated computer agents [2]. As a
result, for example, web services or search engines can im-
prove their performances in terms of exchange of information
or accuracy in searching results, exploiting the semantically
enriched representation of the information they share. For
these reasons, ontologies are increasingly considered also as a
key factor for enabling interoperability across heterogeneous
systems [9], information retrieval [1], multimedia knowledge
representation [27] and complex user-based digital ecosys-
tems [21]. Following this trend, companies of all sizes and
research groups have produced a plethora of data or concep-
tual models for many applications such as e-commerce, gov-
ernment intelligence, medicine, manufacturing, etc. This,
together with the progress of information and communica-
tion technologies, has made available a huge amount of dis-
parate information, raising the problem of managing hetero-
geneity among various information sources and sharing com-
plex knowledge representation [30, 7]. Furthermore, avail-
able ontologies in the literature are becoming increasingly
large in terms of number of concepts and relations, to such
an extent that they can be certainly considered Big Data
[33, 24, 5, 6].Ontologies are often the result of collabora-
tive and distributed efforts that require effective methodolo-
gies to guarantee their maintenance and evolution. In the
attempt to mitigate the increasing heterogeneity and com-
plexity of modern ontologies, several related research fields
have emerged in the last years. Ontology evolution and on-
tology versioning aim at managing the inevitable changes
-1-
to which ontologies are subject over time; whereas, ontol-
ogy matching, mapping, alignment, and ontology integration
and merging are the most spread research areas which aim to
overcome the heterogeneity issue. One of the most notable
applications of ontology integration is ontology reuse. In
the context of ontology engineering, reuse of existing knowl-
edge models is recommended as a key factor to develop cost
effective and high quality ontologies, since it reduces the
cost and the time required for the conceptualization of spe-
cific domains from scratch [4], [20] increasing the quality of
newly implemented ontologies by reusing components that
have already been validated. Finally, it avoids the confusion
and the inconsistencies that may be generated from multiple
representations of the same domain; thus, it strengthens the
orchestration and harmonization of knowledge.
The problem becomes challenging when the knowledge is
represented using detailed information; it is clear that these
information can be used as a knowledge base in several digi-
tal systems to the dawn of complex virtual environments. In
particular, Knowledge Representation is essential for defin-
ing and managing the complex systems, that in the Internet
of Things area represents a community of digital devices and
the connected persons, as a whole new environment that is
called digital ecosystem.
This paper is an attempt to answer the following ques-
tions: what is the knowledge at the basis of the ecosystem
in order to manage this kind of complex environments? How
can we create new knowledge, reusing existing representa-
tions? How can we integrate all the knowledge extracted
by a system for supporting novel ecosystems and environ-
ments? Taking into account the above considerations and
the proposed questions, this paper presents a new approach
for ontology integration oriented to the ontology reuse for
digital ecosystems aims. In particular, we use a combination
of existing matching techniques based on a knowledge back-
ground by exploiting the domain experts’ knowledge and
some generic linguistic oracles. The novelty of the proposed
approach consists in adopting an extended linguistic analy-
sis, which, starting from the vocabularies contained in each
source ontology representing a particular knowledge, and
relating them according to the knowledge background, inte-
grates the local ontologies in a global conceptualization of a
specific knowledge or application domain. In other words,
the ultimate goal of the presented approach is to ease the
process of ontology construction by automating the selection
and the reuse of existing data models, that may be consid-
ered as a first step in the definition of a complex knowledge
base serving digital ecosystems.
The reminder of the paper is structured as follows. After a
literature review of the main ontology integration and reuse
methodologies, and a clarification of the terminology related
to such research areas, contained in section 2, a description
of the proposed approach is provided in section 3, while
section 4 applies the entire approach to a specific study case,
highlighting results and strengths. Finally, section 5 draws
the conclusion summarizing the major findings and outlining
future investigations.
2. RELATED WORKS
In this section, after a clarification of the terminology used
in the context of ontology integration, matching and reuse,
we provide the state of the art of tools and methodologies
related to such disciplines. The general motivation for these
-2-
research fields is that different ontologies generally use dif-
ferent terminology, different representation languages and
different syntax to refer to the same or similar concepts.
Welcoming the suggestion for a clarification of the terminol-
ogy contained in [12], and according to some related works
in the literature [10], [25], we define ontology matching as
the process of finding relationships or correspondences be-
tween entities of different ontologies; ontology alignment, as
a set of correspondences between two or more ontologies;
ontology mapping, as the oriented, or directed, version of
an alignment, i.e., it maps the entities of one ontology to
at most one entity of another ontology; ontology integration
and merging as the construction of a new ontology based on
the information found in two or more source ontologies; and
finally, ontology reuse as the process in which available on-
tologies are used as input to generate new ontologies. It is a
common practice in the literature to consider heterogeneity
resolution and related ontology matching or mapping strate-
gies to be an internal part of ontology merging or integration
[16]. Several works have been addressed in the last decade to
ameliorate the ontology mapping and matching strategies for
an effective and efficient data integration. According to Choi
[9], ontology mapping can be classified into three categories:
1) mapping between an integrated global ontology and lo-
cal ontologies, 2) mapping between local ontologies and 3)
mapping on ontology merging and alignment. In particular,
the third category is used as a part of ontology merging or
alignment in an ontology reuse process. Some of the most
spread tools belonging to this category are: SMART and
PROMPT [23], which are semi-automatic ontology merging
and alignment tools; OntoMorph [8] that provides a rule
language for specifying mappings; FCA-Merge [31] that is
a method for ontology merging based on Ganter and Willes
formal concept analysis, lattice exploration, and instances of
ontologies to be merged; and finally, CHIMAERA [19] that
is an interactive merging tool based on Ontolingual ontology
editor. A survey of the matching systems is also provided by
Shvaiko and Euzenat in [30], where, in addition to an analyt-
ical comparison of the recent tools and techniques, the au-
thors argue on the opportunity to pursue further researches
in ontology matching and propose a list of promising direc-
tions for the future. A recent trend and one of the future
challenge suggested by the authors, is the ontology match-
ing using knowledge background [22]. Contrary to the direct
matching that involves only the knowledge contained in the
input ontologies entities, the new methodology performs the
matching by discovering a common context or background
knowledge for the ontologies and use it to extract relations
between ontologies entities. Adding context can helps to
increase the recall but at the same time may also gener-
ate incorrect matches decreasing the precision, thus, a right
tradeoff must be found. As background knowledge, on the
one hand, it is common to use generic knowledge sources and
tools, such as WordNet, Linked Open Data like DBpedia, or
the web itself; on the other hand, they can be used domain
specific ontologies, upper level ontologies, or the ontologies
available on the Web. The semantic matching framework S-
Match [13], for example, uses WordNet as a linguistic oracle,
while the work in [29] discusses the use of UMLS (Unified
Medical Language System), instead of WordNet, as a knowl-
edge background in medical applications.
As mentioned in the introduction, ontology integration is
mainly applied when the main concern is the reuse of on-
tologies. In this regard, it is worth noticing that several
knowledge management methodologies consider the reuse
of knowledge as an important phase of the entire knowl-
edge management process. Common KADS methodology
[28], for instance, makes use of a collection of ready-made
model elements (a kind of building blocks) which prevent the
knowledge engineer to reinventing the wheel when modeling
a knowledge domain. Pinto and Martins [25] have analyzed
the process of knowledge reuse from a methodological point
of view, thus introducing an approach that comprises sev-
eral phases and activities. Moreover, the European research
project NeOn [32] proposed a novel methodology for build-
ing ontology, which emphasizes the role of existing ontolog-
ical and non-ontological resources for the knowledge reuse.
However, some open issues remain, especially concerning the
difficulty of dealing with the extreme formalisms heterogene-
ity of the increasing number of models available in literature
[4]. The absence of an automatic framework for the rigorous
evaluation of the knowledge sources is also a severe limita-
tion to overcome.
The research introduced in this paper tries to overcome
the above difficulties, by adopting a rigorous framework for
knowledge reuse based on the combination of existing on-
tology matching and integration methodologies. It exploits
the available tools in order to automatize the tasks it in-
volves thereby reducing the human intervention as much as
possible.
3. A FRAMEWORK FOR ONTOLOGY
REUSE
This section describes a high-level architecture of the pro-
posed framework for ontology reuse. As shown in figure 1,
our framework presents four main functional blocks, which,
starting from the identification of the existing knowledge
sources and models (hereafter referred to as reference mod-
els or data models), along with the reconciliation and nor-
malization of such models, obtain a comprehensive and in-
tegrated representation of the domain under study, by an
effective and efficient reuse of selected data models existing
in the literature.
The first component of the framework is the Reference
Models Retrieval function block. It is responsible for re-
trieving the reference models corresponding to the domain
of interest. In order to search for proper data models, it
is needed to identify the knowledge domain and the related
subdomains covering the specific topic under study. The
contribution of domain experts is essential in this phase in
order to clarify the meaning of some poorly defined con-
cepts and to help knowledge engineers moving among the
existing knowledge sources over the Internet or other legacy
archives. Some of the available resources for domain iden-
tification are: general purpose or content-specific encyclo-
pedia, like Wikipedia; web directories, e.g., DMOZ (from
directory.mozilla.org) and Yahoo! Directory; standard clas-
sifications and other electronic and hard-copy knowledge
sources, including technical manuals, reports, etc. Once
the domain of interest has been properly defined, a Cor-
pus of selected reference models is populated by collecting
them from different knowledge sources, such as: special-
ized portals and websites within public or private organi-
zations; search engines (e.g., Google, Bing, etc.), special-
ized semantic-based engines, ontology repositories including:
-3-
BioPortal, Schemapedia, Knoodl, etc., and search engines
for semantic web ontologies, like Swoogle and the Watson
Semantic search engine. To make a first screening of ref-
erence models, a set of qualitative criteria can be adopted.
For example, the formality level that describes the formal-
ity of the reference model and can range from plain text to
description logic-based languages; the type generality, that
evaluates the model type from the viewpoint of its gener-
ality (upper ontologies like BFO and DOLCE or, on the
other hand, domain specific ontologies, like the IFC: Indus-
try Foundation Classes). Furthermore, it can be used the
type structure that evaluates the model type from the view-
point of its structure (simple classifications or taxonomies
versus semantic enriched ontologies); the model language,
such as RDF/OWL, graphic-based languages and pure text;
the model provenance, e.g., standards or conceptual models
authored by influential scientific groups, like BIM: Building
Information Model or OBO: Open Biological and Biomed-
ical Foundry ontologies, or other; and finally, the model li-
cense that evaluates the availability of the reference model
(open data-model versus proprietary and licensed models).
The second component of the framework is the Reference
Model Reconciliation and Normalization function block. It
is responsible for adapting the collected reference models to
a common representation format. This step is mandatory
due to the heterogeneity of languages used to represent and
formalize existing reference models in the literature. An-
other important operation performed at this stage is the
normalization of textual representation of entities metadata
(labels or comments) at a morphological and syntactic level.
The linguistic normalization is performed by resolving multi-
languages mismatching automatically or manually translat-
ing metadata description from whatever languages into En-
glish. The normalization also involves the following oper-
ations: the tokenization, the lemmatization and the stop-
words elimination. The main component of the framework
is the Reference Model Matching function block. It is re-
sponsible for obtaining an alignment (A), i.e., a set of corre-
spondences between the matched entities from the reference
models (in this section and in the next one referred also as
input models) and the target model (defined in section 4).
This function block is also responsible for helping domain
experts to select the relevant reference models from the Cor-
pus by performing extended linguistic analysis. As shown in
figure 1, the matcher involves three types of matching oper-
ations: string, linguistic and extended linguistic matching.
It may use several sources as background knowledge, such
as general background knowledge bases like WordNet and
domain specific knowledge bases. All the matching compo-
nents will be detailed in section 4. The fourth component
of the framework is the Reference Models Merging or Inte-
gration function block. It is responsible for integrating the
selected input models into a global, richer and consistent
view, abstracting the local conceptualizations of the input
models themselves. According to the correspondences mea-
sures contained in the alignment set (A), the following oper-
ations will be performed over the matched entities from the
input models: if two or more entities (concepts or relations)
from the input models are equivalent w.r.t. a certain target
entity, from a set-theoretic perspective, they will be auto-
matically merged in the same entity in the target ontology;
if an entity expresses a concept or relation subsumed by a
target entity, it will be imported in the target ontology with
 Figure 1: High-level view of the proposed framework
the consensus of the domain experts. The same approach
will be used if a concept subsumes another target concept. If
an entity is completely disjointed w.r.t all the target entity,
it may be irrelevant and so discarded or can be considered
a new entity that eventually enriches the target model. Fi-
nally, the domain experts consensus is also needed in the
case in which an intersection exists between two entities.
4. THE MATCHING METHODOLOGY
The objective of the proposed matching methodology con-
sists in creating an alignment, i.e., a set of correspondences
among the entities coming from the input models and those
of the target ontology. In this work, the target ontology
can be envisioned as the final goal of the integration ap-
proach but at the early phases of the proposed approach
also as a kind of proto-ontology encompassing domain key-
words, terms definitions, and concepts meanings related to
the target knowledge domain and the application require-
ments upon which the domain experts are agree. The align-
ment is used as a basis for the integration of the input on-
tologies into a coherent and global conceptualization of the
domain under study.
We define the correspondence c as the tuple:
c = (e1, e2, r, v)
e1 being an entity from the first ontology, e2 being an en-
tity from the second ontology to be compared, r being a
matching relation and v being a similarity measure between
the two entities based on the particular matching relation.
Each correspondence can be expressed in different format,
such as RDF/OWL, XML, or text. In this work, we use an
RDF/OWL-based representation of alignments. Each entity
involved in a matching operation has a unique id correspond-
ing to the URI of the input ontology. The matching relations
are: StringMatch and Wu-PalmerMatch.
In the following sub-sections each of the matching method-
ologies will be further detailed.
-4-
4.1 The string-based matching
The string matching operation is performed between the
input ontology entities and the target entities labels. In this
phase, also other ontology metadata like comments will be
compared. We use an approximate string matching based
on the consolidated Levenshtein distance [15] to quantify
how dissimilar two strings are to one another. It counts the
minimum number of edit operations (i.e. insertions, dele-
tions or substitutions) required to transform one string into
the other. For example, the Levenshtein distance between
”kitten” and ”sitting” is 3, since are necessary three edits
to change one into the other, and there is no way to do it
with fewer than three edits. We use the Levenshtein dis-
tance since it represents a good trade-off between efficiency
and ease of implementation. In fact, there are plenty of well-
known and tested third party APIs of Levenshtein algorithm
in the most spread programming languages.
4.2 The linguistic matching
The linguistic matching is responsible for a comprehensive
analysis of the terms used in the input models at a seman-
tic level, using an external linguistic database like WordNet
or other domain specific knowledge sources as background
knowledge. In WordNet, nouns, verbs, adjectives and ad-
verbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets),
each expressing a different concept [11]. The synsets are in-
terlinked by conceptual-semantic and lexical relations, thus
realizing a graph-based structure where synsets are nodes
and lexical-relations are the edges. Exploiting the WordNet
graph-based representation, it is possible to relate concepts
at a semantic level, for example, by calculating the Wu-
Palmer similarity, which counts the number of edges between
two concepts by taking into account their proximity to the
root concept of the hierarchy. According to [18], Wu-Palmer
similarity has the advantage of being simple to calculate, in
addition to its performances while remaining as expressive as
the others. Both the string and semantic similarity measure
as a result of matching operation contribute to defining the
semantic relation between the entities. The semantic rela-
tions correspond to set-theoretic relations between ontology
classes: equivalence (=), disjointness (⊥), less general (≤),
more general (≥) and concept correlation (∩). A thresh-
olding method is used to establish the type of set-theoretic
relation that hold between the entities.

4.3 Extended linguistic matching

The extended linguistic matcher component defines and (a) Lexical Properties (b) Semantic Properties
implements a meta-model for ontology matching using a con-
ceptualization as much as possible close to the way in which Figure 3: Linguistic properties
the concepts are organized and expressed in human language
[26]. The matcher exploits the meta-model for improving the
accuracy for candidate reference model analysis. We define (see figure 3(a) and 3(b)). In table 1 some of the consid-
our meta-model as composed by a triple ⟨S; P ; C⟩ where: S ered properties and their domain and range of definition are
is a set of objects; P is the set of properties used to link the shown.
objects in S; C is a set of constraints on P . In this context,
we consider concepts and words as objects; the properties Table 1: Properties
are linguistic relations and the constraints are validity rules
Property Domain Range
applied on linguistic properties w.r.t. the considered term hasWord Concept Word
category. In our approach, the target knowledge is repre- hasConcept
hypernym
Word
NounsAnd
Concept
NounsAnd
sented by the target ontology. A concept is a set of words VerbsConcept VerbsConcept
holonym NounConcept NounConcept
which represent an abstract idea. In this model, every node, entailment VerbWord VerbWord
similar AdjectiveConcept AdjectiveConcept
both concept and word, is an OWL individual. The connect-
ing edges in the ontology are represented as ObjectProper-
ties. These properties have some constraints that depend on The use of domain and codomain reduces the property
the syntactic category or on the kind of property (semantic range application. For example, the hyponymy property is
or lexical). For example, the hyponymy property can relate defined on the sets of nouns and verbs; if it is applied on
only nouns to nouns or verbs to verbs; on the other hand a the set of nouns, it has the set of nouns as range, otherwise,
semantic property links concepts to concepts and a syntactic if it is applied to the set of verbs, it has the set of verbs as
one relates word forms to word forms. Concept and word range. In table 2 there are some of defined constraints and
attributes are considered with DatatypeProperties, which re- we specify on which classes they have been applied w.r.t. the
late individuals with a predefined data type. Each word is considered properties; the table shows the matching range
related to the represented concept by the ObjectProperty too.
hasConcept while a concept is related to words that repre-
sent it using the ObjectProperty hasWord. These are the Table 2: Model constraints
only properties able to relate words with concepts and vice Costraint Class Property Constraint range
versa; all the other properties relate words to words and AllValuesFrom NounConcept hyponym NounConcept
AllValuesFrom AdjectiveConcept attribute NounConcept
concepts to concepts. Concepts, words and properties are AllValuesFrom NounWord synonym NounWord
AllValuesFrom AdverbWord synonym AdverbWord
arranged in a class hierarchy, resulting from the syntactic AllValuesFrom VerbWord also see VerbWord
category for concepts and words and from the semantic or
lexical type for the properties. Figures 2(a) and 2(b) show
Sometimes the existence of a property between two or
that the two main classes are: Concept, in which all the ob-
more individuals entails the existence of other properties.
jects have defined as individuals and Word which represents
For example, being the concept dog a hyponym of animal, we
all the terms in the ontology.
can assert that animal is an hypernym of dog. We represent
this characteristics in OWL, by means of property features
shown in table 3.
Having defined the meta-model previously described, a
Semantic Network (i.e. DSN) is dynamically built using a
dictionary based on WordNet or other domain specific re-
(a) Concept (b) Word
sources. We define a semantic network as a graph consisting
of nodes which represent concepts and edges which repre-
Figure 2: Concept and Word sent semantic relations between concepts. The role of do-
main experts is strategic in this phase because they interact
The subclasses have been derived from the related cate- with the system by providing a list of domain keywords and
gories. There are some union classes useful to define prop- concept definition feeding the proto-ontology. The DSN is
erties domain and codomain. We define some attributes built starting from such first version of the target ontology,
for Concept and Word respectively: Concept hasName that i.e, the domain keywords and the concept definition words
represents the concept name; Description that gives a short sets. We then consider all the component synsets and con-
description of concept. On the other hand Word has Name struct a hierarchy, only based on the hyponymy property;
as attribute that is the word name. All elements have an ID the last level of our hierarchy corresponds to the last level
within the WordNet offset number or a user defined ID. The of WordNet one. After this first step, we enrich our hierarchy
semantic and lexical properties are arranged in a hierarchy considering all the other kinds of relationships in WordNet.

-5-
 Table 3: Property features
Property Features
hasWord inverse of hasConcept
hasConcept inverse of hasWord
hyponym inverse of hypernym; transitivity
hypernym
cause
inverse of hyponym; transitivity
transitivity
verbGroup symmetry and transitivity
In our approach, after the DSN building step, we compare it
with the selected input models lexical chains. The intersec-
tion between DSN and the reference models give us a lexical
chain with the relevant terms related to the target ontology.
All terms are linked by properties from the DSN. Therefore,
the DSN give us a conceptual frame useful to discriminate
the pertinent reference models from the other ones. In order
to evaluate the relevancy of the selected reference model, it
is necessary to define a system grading that is able to assign
a vote to the model based on their syntactic and semantic
content. We use the approach described in [26] to calcu-
late a Global Grade (GG) for each semantic network related
to each selected reference model. The GG is given by the
sum of the Syntactic-Semantic Grade (SSG) and the Seman-
tic Grade (SG). The first contribution gives us information
about the analyzed model by taking into account the poly-
semy of the term, i.e., the measure of ambiguity in the use
of a word, thus, with an accurate definition of the role of the
considered term in the model. We call this measure central-
1 gard, a greater weight has been given to reference models
ity of the term i and we define it as: ϖ(i) = poly(i) where
poly(i) is the polysemy (number of senses) of i.
We can define the relevance of the reference model as the
sum of its relevant word weights (terms centralities):
!
n
SSG(ν) = ϖ(i)
i=1
where n is the number of terms in the model ν.
The other contribution (SG) is based on a combination of
the path length (l) between pairs of terms and the depth (d)
of their subsumer (i.e. the first common ancestor), expressed
as number of hops. Moreover, to each linguistic property,
represented by arcs between the nodes of the DSN, a weight
is assigned in order to express the strength of each relation.
We argue that not all the properties have the same strength
when they link concepts or words (this difference is related
to the nature of the considered linguistic property). The
weights are real numbers in the [0,1] interval and their val-
ues are set by experiments and they are validated, from a
strength comparison point of view, by experts.
We can now introduce the definition of Semantic Grade
(SG), that extends a metric proposed in [17]:
! experts by providing keywords and concept definitions re-
eβ·d(wi ,wj ) − e−β·d(wi ,wj )
SG(ν) = e−α·l(wi ,wj )
(wi ,wj )
eβ·d(wi ,wj ) + e−β·d(wi ,wj )
where (wi , wj ) are a pairs of word in the intersection be-
tween DNS and model reference ν and α ≥ 0 and β > 0 are
two scaling parameters whose values have been defined by
experiments.
The final grade is the sum of the Syntactic-Semantic Grade
and the Semantic Grade. Once we have obtained the Global
Grade for each semantic network, they are compared with
a threshold value that act as a filter for the input reference
models, thus giving us the most relevant input model at a
linguistic level.
5. A CASE STUDY FROM THE FOOD DO-
MAIN
In this section, we apply the proposed approach to the
food domain, specifically to the industrial production of
food. Since the food is an umbrella topic involving con-
cepts related to different disciplines and applications, it rep-
resents a valid benchmark to test our approach in order to
select those reference models that not only are about food
in general, but whose main concern is on the production of
food. Each of the function block in figure 1 will be applied in
the following. Regarding to the reference model retrieving
function block, we have selected, with the consensus of do-
main experts, the following main knowledge sources: Google
search engine, Google Scholar, ISO International Classifica-
tion of Standards and OAEI 2007 Food test case. The har-
vesting of reference models has been executed mostly man-
ually even though some tools for automating search queries
over Google Scholar have been successfully experimented.
The retrieving function block has provided tens of reference
models, which have been collected in the reference corpus.
Throughout the first function block, we have also applied
the evaluation criteria discussed in section 3. In this re-
constructed in OWL or RDF language, these ones being
the final languages used in the integrated ontology, and to
model provenance and availability. Table 4(a) shows a list of
the reference models sorted in order or preference. With the
reconciliation and normalization function block, we have ob-
tained a set of normalized, representation language-agnostic
(1) data models. In order to do this, firstly we have flattened
the reference models concept hierarchy since we do not apply
any structural analysis in this phase. Later on, we have ap-
plied the linguistic normalization operations listed in section
3, to the model signature, i.e., to the textual representation
of the model entities (concepts or relations) and their meta-
data (label, comments). This process, conveniently applied
to each selected model, has resulted in a lexical chain for
each model. Figure 4 shows the application of these steps
to an excerpt of the National Cancer Institute Thesaurus
(NCIT).
In order to apply the matching function block to the in-
put models, it is necessary to construct a prototype of the
target ontology. As already discussed in section 4.3, the
prototype can be envisioned as a proto-ontology from which
an integrated global ontology will result along with the se-
lected (reused) component ontologies. To the construction
of the proto-ontology have contributed mostly the domain
lated to the food production topic. With the target ontology
(2)
at hand the third block, on the one hand, helps knowledge
engineers to automatically select and evaluate the input on-
tologies, while, on the other hand, provides a set of align-
ments, which will be used in the integration module. It
performs string and linguistic matching between the lexical
chains of the input models and that of the proto-ontology.
Then it computes the Jaccard measure for each model as
the ratio between the cardinalities of the intersection of the
input lexical chain (see figure 4(a)) and the target one and
their union. The intersection of the input lexical chain con-
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 (a) Qualitative criteria analysis
N. Reference model Formality Generality Structure Language Provenance License
1) National Cancer Institute Thesaurus Formal Domain Ontology OWL Non-stand Open
2) AGROVOC Semi-formal Domain Ontology RDF Non-stand. Open
3) Linked Recipe Schema Semi-formal Domain Ontolog RDF Other Open
4) BBC Food Ontology Semi-formal Domain Ontology RDF Other Open
5) LIRMM Semi-formal Domain Ontology RDF Other Open
6) The Product Types Ontology Semi-formal Application Ontology RDF Non-stand. Open
7) oregonstate.edu Food Glossary Informal Application Glossary Text Other Open
8) Eurocode 2 Food Coding System Informal Domain Classification Text Non-stand. Open
9) WAND Food and Beverage Taxonomy Semi-formal Domain Taxonomy Text Private companies Proprietary
10) Food technology ISO Standard Semi-formal Domain Taxonomy Text Stand. Organiz. Proprietary

(b) Linguistic Matching Analysis

NCIT Rel. AGROVOC
Food Product ≤ Food
Food Component = Food Composition
Beef ≤ Animal Product
Beef ≤ Fresh Meat
Beverage ≥ Alcoholic Beverage
Wine = Wine
Drink ≤ Alcoholic Beverage
Fruit and Vegetables ≥ Vegetable Product
Nutrient ∩ Food composition
Diary product ≥ Animal Product

Table 4: Selected Reference Models Analysis

(a) Ontology Excerpt and Lexical Chain (b) Extended Semantic Network Excerpt

Figure 4: NCIT Extended Linguistic analisys

tains all terms with have a string and a linguistic similarity
greater than a certain prefixed thresholds. According to the
linguistic and string analysis, the best models related to the
target ontology in this study case are: 1), 2), 6) and 10).
This result is consistent with the fact that the remaning
ontologies or models listed in table 4(a) are about others
aspects of food relating mostly with food service or receipts
(3), or about others not relevant aspects (7, 8) of the food
domain. The final step of the matching function block is
the extended linguistic analysis. As described in section 4.3,
this analysis converts the input and target lexical chains in
semantic networks containing an extended set of concepts
w.r.t. the initial set from the lexical chain. This new set
encompasses hyponyms, hypernyms, meronyms, holonyms,
etc., retrieved from WordNet. Furthermore, the concepts of
the semantic network are linked to each other with the lin-
guistic and semantic relations provided in the meta-model
described in section 4.2. Figure 4(b) shows an excerpt of the
direct semantic network (DNS) for the NICT lexical chain.
The extended linguistic analysis has substantially confirmed
the choice of the previously selected model giving more rel-
evance to 10) and that is consistent with the scope of ISO
data model. For this reason, the input models 1), 2) and
10) have been selected as the local ontologies to be inte-
grated by the merging and integration function block. The
fourth function block applies the alignments resulting from
the matcher according to the section 4.2 and integrate the
local ontologies in the global one. Table 4(b) shows an ex-
cerpt of the alignment resulting by matching the NICT and
the AGROVC ontologies.
At the moment, the results of the produced ontology has
been qualitatively validated by domain experts. We are
planning to design and implement automatic tools for qual-
itative and quantitative analysis of the results: a more de-
tailed analysis however goes beyond the scope of the present
paper, in which we are mainly focused to validate the whole
integration process.
6. CONCLUSIONS
This work has shown a mixed approach to ontology reuse
exploiting some existing techniques in ontology integration
and outlining a semi-automatic workflow, particularly suit-
able for digital ecosystems knowledge base. We have carried
out several experimentations in a specific digital ecosystem,
i.e. Food domain. We have thus effectively demonstrated
that an approach based on linguistic matching can help to
automatize the selection of the most relevant reference mod-
els of a complex system, by properly distinguishing those
models that belong to a specific interpretation of the do-
main under study among others. Nonetheless, this process
requires a significant amount of manual work, even when it
deals with common and formal models. This requirement
may be a severe limitation for a widespread adoption of the
knowledge reuse and may represent a relevant technologi-
cal gap to be addressed by researchers in the next future.
Furthermore, ambiguity, inconsistency, heterogeneity in on-
tology models need a practical technique able to overcome

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these difficulties, also by testing the entire approach against
other knowledge domains, in order to evaluate its practica-
bility in different contexts. Finally, new matching similar-
ity measures will be subject of further researches with the
aim of improving the precision and recall of the alignments,
comparing them with gold standard tests and, in this way,
ameliorating the entire approach.
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