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Ontologies as means for conceptualiz- ing and structuring domain knowledge within a community of interest are seen as a key to realize the Semantic Web vision. However, the decentral- ized nature of the Web makes achieving this con- sensus across communities difficult, thus, hamper- ing efficient knowledge sharing between them. In order to balance the autonomy of each community with the need for interoperability, mapping mech- anisms between distributed ontologies in the Se- mantic Web are required. In this paper we present MAFRA, an interactive, incremental and dynamic framework for mapping distributed ontologies in the Semantic Web. ized" approach of mediation is probably not flexible enough, and distributed systems of mediation are more appropriate. Building on this idea and on existing work, we introduce in this paper MAFRA, an Ontology MApping FRAmework (MAFRA) for distributed ontologies in the Semantic Web. Within MAFRA we provide an approach and conceptual framework that provides a generic view onto the overall dis- tributed mapping process. The distributed nature of Semantic Web entails significant degrees of information redundancy, incoherence and constant evolution, thus changing the nature of the ontology mapping problem: instead of creating a static specification document relating entities in two ontologies, a continuous, incremental, interactive and highly dynamic pro- cess supporting mapping evolution is required to scale up to the ever-changing nature of ontologies being mapped. Estab- lishing a mapping between two ontologies is an engineering process of consensus building between two communities al- ready agreeing on common ontologies for their own respec- tive domains. This task implies negotiation, so attention is paid to providing means for cooperative mapping. Thus, pro- posed framework offers support in all parts of the ontology mapping life-cycle.