🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the lack of effective validation mechanisms for cross-ontology semantic mappings by proposing a verification framework grounded in ontological metaphysical commitments. The approach uniquely incorporates metaphysical choices as constraints, employing cardinality restrictions to formally specify mappings between distinct ontologies—such as IES and BFO—and leverages SPARQL queries for automated validation. By integrating ontological analysis, modeling of metaphysical commitments, and precise definition of cardinality constraints, the work establishes an operational validation pipeline demonstrated in an IES–BFO mapping case study. This framework significantly enhances the logical consistency and semantic quality of ontology alignments, thereby offering both theoretical grounding and a practical pathway for achieving semantic interoperability across heterogeneous ontologies.
📝 Abstract
In this paper we discuss the foundations behind a novel methodology for the validation of semantic mappings between different data sources based upon different foundation ontologies, where the methodology builds a framework based upon the metaphysical commitments of the ontologies. We provide as example the test case of mappings between IES and BFO, and we especially focused on providing cardinality constraints on the mappings between the two ontologies. In order to demonstrate the applicability of our method, we showcased how these principles can be operationalized through SPARQL queries validating the results of a mapping pipeline.