Ontology-Alignment Techniques: Survey and Analysis

Abstract

The ontology alignment consists in generating a set of correspondences between entities. These entities can be concepts, properties or instances. The ontology alignment is an important task because it allows the joint consideration of resources described by different ontologies. This paper aims at counting all works of the ontology alignment field and analyzing the approaches according to different techniques (terminological, structural, extensional and semantic). This can clear the way and help researchers to choose the appropriate solution to their issue. They can see the insufficiency, so that they can propose new approaches for stronger alignment. They can also adapt or reuse alignment techniques for specific research issues, such as semantic annotation, maintenance of links between entities, etc.