Merging taxonomies under RCC-5 algebraic articulations

Taxonomies are widely used to classify information, and multiple (possibly competing) taxonomies often exist for the same domain. Given a set of correspondences between two taxonomies, it is often necessary to "merge" the taxonomies, thereby creating a unified taxonomy (e.g., that can then be used by data integration and discovery applications). We present an algorithm for merging taxonomies that have been related using articulations given as RCC-5 constraints. Two taxa N and M can be related using (disjunctions of) the five base relations in RCC-5: N = M; N M; N M; N M (partial overlap of N and M); and N M (disjointness: N M = ∅). RCC-5 is increasingly being adopted by scientists to specify mappings between large species taxonomies. We discuss the properties of the proposed merge algorithm and evaluate our approach using real-world biological taxonomies.