  The proliferation of ontologies and taxonomies in many domains increasingly
demands the integration of multiple such ontologies. The goal of ontology
integration is to merge two or more given ontologies in order to provide a
unified view on the input ontologies while maintaining all information coming
from them. We propose a new taxonomy merging algorithm that, given as input two
taxonomies and an equivalence matching between them, can generate an integrated
taxonomy in a fully automatic manner. The approach is target-driven, i.e. we
merge a source taxonomy into the target taxonomy and preserve the structure of
the target ontology as much as possible. We also discuss how to extend the
merge algorithm providing auxiliary information, like additional relationships
between source and target concepts, in order to semantically improve the final
result. The algorithm was implemented in a working prototype and evaluated
using synthetic and real-world scenarios.
