Assessing Ontology Mappings on a Level of Concepts and Instances

Abstract

In recent years, the number of domain ontologies on the Internet has been steadily increasing. Many ontologies describe overlapping universes of discourse in various ways, therefore, the need for an efficient ontology alignment method is required. Currently, there are many solutions for this problem. However, the only known way to evaluate their output is to confront it with some pre-prepared reference alignment, therefore making it impossible to incorporate in real-world applications where no reference alignment is given. This paper presents some innovative methods of evaluating ontology alignments which allows assessing their quality without the aforementioned reference alignment. The main contribution are formal foundations of such methods, algorithms developed based on those foundations, and an experimental verification of their usefulness.

Keywords

• Knowledge-based systems
• knowledge management
• ontology alignment