Ontology Alignment—A Survey with Focus on Visually Supported Semi-Automatic Techniques

Abstract

Semantic technologies are of paramount importance to the future Internet. The reuse and integration of semantically described resources, such as data or services, necessitates the bringing of ontologies into mutual agreement. Ontology alignment deals with the discovery of correspondences between concepts and relations from different ontologies. Alignment provides the key ingredient to semantic interoperability. This paper gives an overview on the state of the art in the field of visually supported semi-automatic alignment techniques and presents recent trends and developments. Particular attention is given to user interfaces and visualization techniques supporting involvement of humans in the alignment process. We derive and summarize requirements for visual semi-automatic alignment systems, provide an overview of existing approaches, and discuss the possibilities for further improvements and future research

Requirements for and Evaluation of User Support for Large-Scale Ontology Alignment

“…These requirements contribute to the development of a complete infrastructure that supports the users during large-scale alignment tasks and may pose additional visualization and interface requirements. We note that the requirements in [10] and [7] may also be seen as subsets of the requirements in this paper. The requirements identified in [8] are based on research in the area of cognitive theories.…”

Aligning Biomedical Terminologies in French: Towards Semantic Interoperability in Medical Applications

“…Nevertheless, the necessity of involving humans in the alignment process using visual interfaces has been outlined in (Kotis & Lanzenberger, 2008) within a discourse on ontology alignment challenges. On the same issue, as argued in (Granitzer et al, 2010) visual interfaces can address efficiently the problem of evaluating automatic alignment systems to take advantage of human cognitive capabilities and provide intuitive overview, navigation and detail analysis. Therefore, from next year we are going to offer to experts an evaluation tool connected to our databases to facilitate the evaluation of each automatic mapping.…”

User Validation in Ontology Alignment

“…In most cases, these systems apply fully automated approaches where an alignment is generated for a given pair of input ontologies without any human intervention. However, after many editions of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI), it is becoming clear to the community that there are limits to the performance (in terms of precision and recall of the alignments) of automated systems, as adopting more advanced alignment techniques has brought diminishing returns [40,21]. This is likely due to the complexity and intricacy of the ontology alignment process, with each task having its particularities, dictated by both the domain and the design of the ontologies.…”