I’m working with two ontologies, A and B, which share the same semantics but are expressed using different syntaxes. Does the difference in syntax mean that it’s impossible to find correspondence/mappings between them?
From my understanding, ontology alignment typically focuses on semantic correspondences, so even if the syntax is different, mapping tools should still be able to find them based on the meaning of terms. Is that correct?
Thank you in advance :)
TLDR:
If both are OWL 2 ontologies in either OWL/XML, RDF/XML, OWL Functional or Turtle Syntax, similar semantics should be possible.
If both are OWL 2 ontologies and they do not use GCIs, OWL/XML, RDF/XML, OWL Functional Syntax, Turtle Syntax and Manchester Syntax should be able to give similar semantics.
If both are SKOS etc vocabularies, similar semantics should be possible irrespective of syntax used.
If one is an ontology, the other a vocabulary semantic differences are very likely irrespective of syntax used.
Short Explanation
This really depends on the expressiveness of your ontology (or vocabulary) .
If your ontology is an OWL2 ontology, there are certain axioms (General Concept Inclusions (GCI)) that cannot be translated to Manchester syntax, though OWL/XML, RDF/XML, OWL Functional and Turtle Syntax can capture these.
If you actually using vocabularies (i.e. SKOS, Schema.org etc. ), the syntax is unlikely to matter.
If 1 is an ontology (OWL 2) and the other is a vocabulary (SKOS etc), the semantics of these are likely to be different since with OWL 2 it is possible to give a much richer description of the relations between concepts than what is possible in a vocabulary.
