Consistent Alignments for Simple Ontologies in the Digital Information Supply Chain

A central problem in the exchange of data in the digital information supply chain is achieving consistent alignment of data from actors in the chain. An archetypal case is studied showing that the ontologies involved have simple forms – they may “just” be large. Furthermore, in the case studied, it suffices to use alignments of very simple forms to relate concepts in the ontologies. Concepts for consistent and sane alignments are developed together with methods for checking consistency and sanity within a Propositional Horn Logic framework. An executable model is constructed using the functional programming language F#. The implementation contains a HORNSAT solver based on [16]. Initial experiments show that alignments for the case study can be expressed and that it is feasible to check consistency and sanity using the solver.