Two variations on ontology alignment evaluation: Methodological issues

Abstract

Evaluation of ontology alignments is in practice done in two ways: (1) assessing individual correspondences and (2) comparing the alignment to a reference alignment. However, this type of evaluation does not guarantee that an application which uses the alignment will perform well. In this paper, we contribute to the current ontology alignment evaluation practices by proposing two alternative evaluation methods that take into account some characteristics of a usage scenario without doing a full-fledged end-to-end evaluation. We compare different evaluation approaches in three case studies, focussing on methodological issues. Each case study considers an alignment between a different pair of ontologies, ranging from rich and well-structured to small and poorly structured. This enables us to conclude on the use of different evaluation approaches in different settings. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.