An information retrieval based approach for multilingual ontology matching

Abstract

Ontology matching in a multilingual environment consists of finding alignments between ontologies modeled by using more than one language. Such a research topic combines traditional ontology matching algorithms with the use of multilingual resources, services, and capabilities for easing multilingual matching. In this paper, we present a multilingual ontology matching approach based on Information Retrieval (IR) techniques: ontologies are indexed through an inverted index algorithm and candidate matches are found by querying such indexes. We also exploit the hierarchical structure of the ontologies by adopting the PageRank algorithm for our system. The approaches have been evaluated using a set of domain-specific ontologies belonging to the agricultural and medical domain. We compare our results with existing systems following an evaluation strategy closely resembling a recommendation scenario. The version of our system using PageRank showed an increase in performance in our evaluations.