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Ontologies have become central components in many applications including search, e-commerce, configuration and, arguably, every large web site (at least for organization and navigation). As ontologies become larger, more distributed, and longer-lived, the need for ontology creation and maintenance environments grows. In our work with ontologies and tool environments over the last few years, we have observed growing needs for automated support of two tasks:(1) merging multiple ontologies and (2) diagnosing (and evolving) ontologies. Chimaera is aimed at supporting these two tasks.

We believe these areas will become more critical over time. Merging becomes imperative when multiple terminologies must be used and viewed as one ontology (eg, when an e-commerce company needs to merge the terminologies of UNSPSC and RosettaNet into one consistent ontology). Merging is also critical when distributed team members need to assimilate two or more ontologies that should work together in an integrated fashion. Similarly, diagnosis of ontologies becomes more critical as ontologies are obtained from more varied sources. One may need to use a number of “standard” vocabularies that make differing assumptions about design, representation, or reasoning. For example, some vocabularies may allow cycles while others do not and some may support disjoint partitions while others may not be able to express the notion (and thus not expect any associated reasoning). Additionally outside vocabularies may not follow required internal naming conventions. Diagnosis along many dimensions may be required to focus a human’s attention in …