Concept similarity in SymOntos: An enterprise ontology management tool

The possibility of assessing the similarity between concepts is growing in importance. One of the primary reasons for this is the development of the Net Economy that requires a high level of computer support and flexibility in doing business. In business transactions, similarity plays an important role. It is constantly used whenever certain goods or services are not available with the required characteristics. Then a substitute may be accepted, as far as it is sufficiently close to what was originally required. In this paper we propose a method for evaluating concept similarity. The work has been performed within the SymOntos project concerning the development of a symbolic ontology management system, where concepts are defined in accordance with a frame-oriented approach.