Object property matching utilizing the overlap between imported ontologies

Abstract

Large scale Linked Data is often based on relational databases and thereby tends to be modeled with rich object properties, specifying the exact relationship between two objects, rather than a generic is-a or part-of relationship. We study this phenomenon on government issued statistical data, where a vested interest exists in matching such object properties for data integration. We leverage the fact that while the labeling of the properties is often heterogeneous, e.g. ex1:geo and ex2:location, they link to individuals of semantically similar code lists, e.g. country lists. State-of-the-art ontology matching tools do not use this effect and therefore tend to miss the possible correspondences. We enhance the state-of-the-art matching process by aligning the individuals of such imported ontologies separately and computing the overlap between them to improve the matching of the object properties. The matchers themselves are used as black boxes and are thus interchangeable. The new correspondences found with this method lead to an increase of recall up to 2.5 times on real world data, with only a minor loss in precision. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.