Though having reached and largely adopted standard languages, knowledge representation models are experiencing the heterogeneity of perspective, viewpoint and granularity reflecting the sometimes irreducible differences in the nature and aims of the objects represented and described with such models. Still, web resources, systems and services are laying in a common environment and have to interoperate someway. Agents with their own ontologies should find ways to negotiate meaning in order to cooperate for satisfying common goals.
Upper Ontologies may be used in such meaning negotiation steps and wherever an ontology reconciliation issue should be solved. As for their peculiarity of describing very general concepts that are the same across different domains of discourse, Upper Ontologies may act as a semantic bridge between two domain ontologies that have being conceived for accounting only small fragments of the world knowledge about a specific domain and within different points of observation.

The study that will be presented in this seminar had the aim of designing, developing and evaluating algorithms for ontology matching via Upper Ontologies.

A comparison of the Upper Ontologies available for the research community and of their main characteristics will be outlined during the seminar as well as the choice to exploit in our experiments three of them: SUMO, OpenCyc and DOLCE.

The methodology followed, the new algorithms designed and developed, the results obtained during the experimental phase, and the evaluation of the potential of matching ontologies via Upper ones will be introduced and discussed during the seminar.

Some mid-term directions of the present research will then be outlined asa natural completion of the activity undertaken so far and some further reflections on envisioned directions will complete the seminar