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Merging Top Level Ontologies for Scientific Knowled ge Management John Kingston Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute CISA, Div. of Informatics, University of Edinburgh Edinburgh EH1 HN, Scotland J.Kingston@ed.ac.uk Abstract A group of researchers from the EPSRC-sponsored Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) project had independently developed four different ontologies c overing the same domain: scientific knowledge management (academics, papers, conferences, etc). A reference ontology was developed to allow communication between these four ontologies. It was proposed that the reference onto logy would benefit from incorporating the top level of t he OntoClean ontology (Gangemi et al, 1998) because of the meta-properties that this ontology uses to support ontology structuring decisions. A merged ontology structure is proposed and the issues that arise in the merging p rocess are analysed and iscussed. Introduction A group of researchers from the EPSRC-sponsored Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) project had independently developed four different ontologies c overing the same domain: scientific knowledge management (academics, papers, conferences, etc). These four ontologies – one from the Open University (OU), one from the University of Southampton, and two from the University of Edinburgh -- were collected together and the common high level concepts were identified. These concepts were as follows: ? Publications and other Documents; ? Events - especially Conferences, Seminars, Meetings and Workshops; ? Organisations, including Universities and Research Groups, and also Publishers and Funding Bodies; ? People - generally classified by their ole (Academic Staff, Students, Secretaries, etc) ? Research Areas; ? Projects and other Tasks. The researchers decided to create a“reference onto logy” of this “scientific knowledge management” (SKM) domain that each of the ontologies could communicate to a