A New Tree Similarity Measuring Method and its Application to Ontology Comparison

This paper extends the classical tree similarity measuring method and proposes a definition for cost of tree transformation operations based on the importance of each concept in the entire concept structure and similarity between individual concepts in a knowledge context. We apply the proposed method to ontology comparison where different ontologies for the same domain are represented as trees and their similarity is required to be measured. We show that the proposed method can facilitate the initiation of ontology integration and ontology trust evaluation.