AbstractHierarchical ontologies play a key role in organizing documents in a repository. While matching the ontologies, the relationships among the concepts are considered to be a major aspect. In hierarchical ontologies, the concepts are associated with one another only through the “is-a” relation. In this paper, we discuss an approach for matching heterogeneous hierarchical ontologies that are related to the same domain through the semantic interpretation and implicit context of the concepts. We have designed rules that can handle heterogeneities and inconsistencies that are found in hierarchical ontologies. These rules can be embedded to complement the existing matching systems, to resolve the matching complexities in the hierarchical ontologies.