A study in empirical and 'casuistic' analysis of ontology mapping results

Abstract

Many ontology mapping systems nowadays exist. In order to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, benchmark datasets (ontology collections) have been created, several of which have been used in the most recent edition of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI), While most OAEI tracks rely on straightforward comparison of the results achieved by the mapping systems with some kind of reference mapping created a priori, the 'conference' track (based on the OntoFarm collection of heterogeneous 'conference organisation' ontologies) instead encompassed multiway manual as well as automated analysis of mapping results themselves, with 'correct' and 'incorrect' cases determined a posteriori. The manual analysis consisted in simple labelling of discovered mappings plus discussion of selected cases ('casuistics') within a face-to-face consensus building workshop. The automated analysis relied on two different tools: the DRAGO system for testing the consistency of aligned ontologies and the LISp-Miner system for discovering frequent associations in mapping meta-data including the phenomenon of graph-based mapping patterns. The results potentially provide specific feedback to the developers and users of mining tools, and generally indicate that automated mapping can rarely be successful without considering the larger context and possibly deeper semantics of the entities involved. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.