Putting things in context: A topological approach to mapping contexte and ontologies

Ontologies and contexts are complementary disciplines for modeling views. In the area of information integration, ontologies may be viewed as the outcome of a manual effort of modeling a domain, while contexts are system generated models. In this work, we aim at formalizing the inter-relationships between a manually generated ontology and automatically generated contexts. We provide a formal mathematical framework that delineates the relationship between contexts and ontologies. We then use the model to define the uncertainty associated with automatic context extraction from existing documents and provide a ranking method, which ranks ontology concepts according to their suitability with a given context. Throughout this work we motivate our research using QUALEG, a European IST project that aims at providing local government an effective tool for bidirectional communication with citizens.