Towards Domain Ontology Interoperability Measurement

The nature of ontologies supports their usage as interoperability support components between information systems. However the need to make ontologies themselves interoperable remains high. To address this situation, there is need to study the semantic heterogenity between the ontologies. This paper specifically looks at domain ontologies and how to measure the interoperability degree between them to establish the extent to which they can replace each other. Different interoperability operations between ontologies are discussed together with the measures that define semantic distance and lexical similarity between the ontologies. A method based on model management theory that enables use of algebraic operations such as match on the ontology models is proposed to measure lexical and structural dimensions of domain ontologies to give a value for their degree of interoperabilty. An example of how to compute the degree of interoperability between two domain ontologies using the proposed approach is given with an explanation of how the identified gaps can be addressed.