A novel approach to semantic annotation based on multi-ontologies

Semantic annotation is very crucial to the semantic web. Most traditional researches just commit the web resources to a single ontology. However, many practical semantic annotation cases need multi-ontologies. For the sake of solving the semantic annotation problem based on multi-ontologies, one prevalent approach is extending current ontology or integrating multi-ontologies, but both methods are complex problems which have no good solutions till now; Another approach used Distributed Description Logic to denote multi-ontologies and the subsumption relations between concepts in different ontology with a simple bridge rule, but this approach could not describe more complex relations between multi-ontologies. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed to deal with the problem, and we employ a bridge ontology to express the complex relationships between multi-ontologies. The bridge ontology is a peculiar ontology, which can be created and maintained easily, but effective in semantic annotation applications based on multi-ontologies. The approach has the characteristics of low-cost, scalability, robust in the web circumstance, avoiding the unnecessary ontology extending and integration, and promoting ontology reuse. A semantic annotation framework and an algorithm are proposed in this paper as well.