Ontology Merging as Social Choice: Judgment Aggregation under the Open World Assumption
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 view 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. That is, we
propose to view ontology merging as ontology aggregation. As a first
step in this direction, we formulate several desirable properties for
ontology aggregators, we identify the incompatibility of some of these
properties, and we define and analyse several simple aggregation
procedures. Our approach is closely related to work in judgment
aggregation, but with the crucial difference that we adopt an open
world assumption, by distinguishing between facts not included in an
agent's ontology and facts explicitly negated in an agent's ontology.