Bridge ontology: A multi-ontologies-based approach for semantic annotation

Representing the relationships between ontologies is the key problem of semantic annotations based on multi-ontologies. Traditional approaches only had the ability of denoting the simple concept subsumption relations between ontologies. Through analyzing and classifying the relationships between ontologies, the idea of bridge ontology was proposed, which had the powerful capability of expressing the complex relationships between concepts and relationships between relations in multi-ontologies. Meanwhile, a new approach employing bridge ontology was proposed to deal with the multi-ontologies-based semantic annotation problem. The bridge ontology is a peculiar ontology, which can be created and maintained conveniently, and is effective in the multi-ontologies-based semantic annotation. The approach using bridge ontology has the advantages of low-cost, scalable, robust in the web circumstance, and avoiding the unnecessary ontology extending and integration.