Updating ontology alignments based on new concepts and their context

Abstract

Ontologies and their associated mappings play a central role in several semantic-enabled tasks. However, the continuous evolution of ontologies requires updating existing concept alignments. Whereas mapping maintenance techniques have mostly handled revision and removal type of ontology changes, the addition of concepts demands further studies. This article proposes techniques to refine a set of established mappings based on the evolution of ontologies. We investigate ways of suggesting correspondences with the new version of the ontology without applying a matching operation to the whole set of ontology entities. Obtained results explore the neighbourhood of concepts in the alignment process to update mapping sets. Our experimental evaluation with several versions of aligned biomedical ontologies shows the effectiveness in considering the context of new concepts.