Approximate structure preserving semantic matching

Abstract

Typical ontology matching applications, such as ontology integration, focus on the computation of correspondences holding between the nodes of two graph-like structures, e.g., between concepts in two ontologies. However, there are applications, such as web service integration, where we may need to establish whether full graph structures correspond to one another globally, preserving certain structural properties of the graphs being considered. The goal of this paper is to provide a new matching operation, called structure preserving matching. This operation takes two graph-like structures and produces a set of correspondences between those nodes of the graphs that correspond semantically to one another, (i) still preserving a set of structural properties of the graphs being matched, (ii) only in the case if the graphs are globally similar to one another. We present a novel approximate structure preserving matching approach that implements this operation. It is based on a formal theory of abstraction and on a tree edit distance measure. We have evaluated our solution with encouraging results.