Correspondence of concept hierarchies in semantic Web based upon global instances and its application to facility management database

Semantic Web is the technology which determines the relevance of data over the Web using meta-data and which enables advanced search of global information. It is now desired to develop and apply this technology to many situations of facility management. In facility management, vocabulary should be unified to share the database of facilities for generating optimal maintenance schedule and so on. Under such situations, ontology databases are usually used to describe composition or hierarchy of facility parts. However, these vocabularies used in databases are not unified oven between factories of same company, and this situation causes communication hazard between them. Moreover, concept involved in the hierarchy cannot be corresponded each other. There are some methods to correspond concepts of different hierarchy. But these methods have some defects, because they only attend target hierarchy itself and the number of instances. We propose improved method for corresponding concepts between different concepts' hierarchies, which uses other hierarchies all over the world of Web and the distance of instances to identify their relations. Our method can work even if the sets of instances belonging to the concepts are not identical.