Abstract. We think of Match as an operator which takes two graph-like structures and produces a mapping between semantically related nodes. We concentrate on classifications with tree structures. In semantic matching, correspondences are discovered by translating the natural language labels of nodes into propositional formulas, and by codifying matching into a propositional unsatisfiability problem. We distinguish between problems with conjunctive formulas and problems with disjunctive formulas, and present various optimizations. For instance, we propose a linear time algorithm which solves the first class of problems. According to the tests we have done so far, the optimizations substantially improve the time performance of the system. 1.

Abstract. While current approaches to ontology mapping produce good results by mainly relying on label and structure based similarity measures, there are several cases in which they fail to discover important mappings. In this paper we describe a novel approach to ontology mapping, which is able to avoid this limitation by using background knowledge. Existing approaches relying on background knowledge typically have one or both of two key limitations: 1) they rely on a manually selected reference ontology; 2) they suffer from the noise introduced by the use of semi-structured sources, such as text corpora. Our technique circumvents these limitations by exploiting the increasing amount of semantic resources available online. As a result, there is no need either for a manually selected reference ontology (the relevant ontologies are dynamically selected from an online ontology repository), or for transforming background knowledge in an ontological form. The promising results from experiments on two real life thesauri indicate both that our approach has a high precision and also that it can find mappings, which are typically missed by existing approaches.

In this paper, we propose a set of tasks that are relevant for the modular reuse of ontologies. In order to formalize these tasks as reasoning problems, we introduce the notions of conservative extension, safety and module for a very general class of logic-based ontology languages. We investigate the general properties of and relationships between these notions and study the relationships between the relevant reasoning problems we have previously identified. To study the computability of these problems, we consider, in particular, Description Logics (DLs), which provide the formal underpinning of the W3C Web Ontology Language (OWL), and show that all the problems we consider are undecidable or algorithmically unsolvable for the description logic underlying OWL DL. In order to achieve a practical solution, we identify conditions sufficient for an ontology to reuse a set of symbols “safely”—that is, without changing their meaning. We provide the notion of a safety class, which characterizes any sufficient condition for safety, and identify a family of safety classes–called locality—which enjoys a collection of desirable properties. We use the notion of a safety class to extract modules from ontologies, and we provide various modularization algorithms that are appropriate to the properties of the particular safety class in use. Finally, we show practical benefits of our safety checking and module extraction algorithms. 1.

Modularity is a key requirement for collaborative ontology engineering and for distributed ontology reuse on the Web. Modern ontology languages, such as OWL, are logic-based, and thus a useful notion of modularity needs to take the semantics of ontologies and their implications into account. We propose a logic-based notion of modularity that allows the modeler to specify the external signature of their ontology, whose symbols are assumed to be defined in some other ontology. We define two restrictions on the usage of the external signature, a syntactic and a slightly less restrictive, semantic one, each of which is decidable and guarantees a certain kind of “black-box ” behavior, which enables the controlled merging of ontologies. Analysis of real-world ontologies suggests that these restrictions are not too onerous. 1

Abstract. This paper presents our ongoing effort on developing a principled methodology for automatic ontology mapping based on BayesOWL, a probabilistic framework we developed for modeling uncertainty in semantic web. In this approach, the source and target ontologies are first translated into Bayesian networks (BN); the concept mapping between the two ontologies are treated as evidential reasoning between the two translated BNs. Probabilities needed for constructing conditional probability tables (CPT) during translation and for measuring semantic similarity during mapping are learned using text classification techniques where each concept in an ontology is associated with a set of semantically relevant text documents, which are obtained by ontology guided web mining. The basic ideas of this approach are validated by positive results from computer experiments on two small real-world ontologies. 1

On the investigation of linguistic techniques used in ontology matching, we propose a new idea of virtual documents to pursue a cost-effective approach to linguistic matching in this paper. Basically, as a collection of weighted words, the virtual document of a URIref declared in an ontology contains not only the local descriptions but also the neighboring information to reflect the intended meaning of the URIref. Document similarity can be computed by traditional vector space techniques, and then be used in the similaritybased approaches to ontology matching. In particular, the RDF graph structure is exploited to define the description formulations and the neighboring operations. Experimental results show that linguistic matching based on the virtual documents is dominant in average F-Measure as compared to other three approaches. It is also demonstrated by our experiments that the virtual documents approach is cost-effective as compared to other linguistic matching approaches.

We view match as an operator that takes two graph-like structures (e.g., classifications, XML schemas) and produces a mapping between the nodes of these graphs that correspond semantically to each other. Semantic matching is based on two ideas: (i) we discover mappings by computing semantic relations (e.g., equivalence, more general); (ii) we determine semantic relations by analyzing the meaning (concepts, not labels) which is codified in the elements and the structures of schemas. In this paper we present basic and optimized algorithms for semantic matching, and we discuss their implementation within the S-Match system. We evaluate S-Match against three state of the art matching systems, thereby justifying empirically the strength of our approach.

Abstract Driven by application requirements and using well-understood theoretical results, we describe a novel methodology and a tool for modular ontology design. We support the user in the safe use of imported symbols and in the economic import of the relevant part of the imported ontology. Both features are supported in a well-understood way: safety guarantees that the semantics of imported concepts is not changed, and economic import guarantees that no difference can be observed between importing the whole ontology and importing the relevant part. 1

Abstract. Semantic matching determines the mappings between the nodes of two graphs (e.g., ontologies) by computing logical relations (e.g., subsumption) holding among the nodes that correspond semantically to each other. We present an approach to deal with the lack of background knowledge in matching tasks by using semantic matching iteratively. Unlike previous approaches, where the missing axioms are manually declared before the matching starts, we propose a fully automated solution. The benefits of our approach are: (i) saving some of the pre-match efforts, (ii) improving the quality of match via iterations, and (iii) enabling the future reuse of the newly discovered knowledge. We evaluate the implemented system on large real-world test cases, thus, proving empirically the benefits of our approach. 1

Ontology mapping, alignment, and translation has been an active research component of the general research on semantic integration and interoperability. In our talk, we gave our own classification of different topics in this research. We talked about types of heterogeneity between ontologies, various mapping representations, classified methods for discovering methods both between ontology concepts and data, and talked about various tasks where mappings are used. In this extended abstract of our talk, we provide an annotated bibliography for this area of research, giving readers brief pointers on representative papers in each of the topics mentioned above. We did not attempt to compile a comprehensive bibliography and hence the list in this abstract is necessarily incomplete. Rather, we tried to sketch a map of the field, with some specific reference to help interested readers in their exploration of the work to-date. 1 Survey Articles For more detailed descriptions and bibliography of the field we refer the readers to several recently published surveys: