Federated Ontology Search

In this paper we describe a novel methodology for retrieving and combining information from multiple ontologies. In the last decades the number and diversity of available ontologies has grown considerably. There may be a variety of such resources available, but the cost to integrate them into an application is incremental, and often prohibitive for exploratory prototyping and discouraging for larger-scale integration. However, a unified cross-ontology query interface provides the capability for searching them independently and combining results. Beyond a common interface we further explore combining ontological graph search across knowledge bases and demonstrate superior results in the context of type-checking for automated Q&A systems. The paper presents the method and our initial promising results.