Ontology Merging as Social Choice
Daniele Porello, Ulle Endriss

Abstract:
The problem of merging several ontologies has important applications
in the Semantic Web, medical ontology engineering, and other domains
where information from several distinct sources needs to be integrated
in a coherent manner. We propose to treat ontology merging as a
problem of social choice, i.e., as a problem of aggregating the input
of a set of individuals into an adequate collective decision, and we
show how to apply the methodology of social choice theory in this new
domain.  We do this for the case of ontologies that are modelled using
description logics. Specifically, we formulate a number of desirable
properties for ontology merging procedures, we identify the
incompatibility of some of these properties, and we define and analyse
several concrete procedures.