Explaining alignments

Abstract

Matching systems may produce effective alignments that may not be intuitively obvious to human users. In order for users to trust the alignments, and thus use them, they need information about them, e.g., they need access to the sources that were used to determine semantic correspondences between ontology entities. Explanations are also useful when matching large applications with thousands of entities, e.g., business product classifications, such as UNSPSC and eCl@ss. In such cases, automatic matching solutions will find many plausible correspondences, and hence user input is required for performing cleaning-up of the alignment. Finally, explanations can also be viewed and applied as argumentation schemas for negotiating alignments between agents. In this chapter we describe how a matching system can explain its answers, thus making the matching result intelligible. The material of this chapter is mainly based on the work in [Shvaiko et al., 2005, McGuinness and Pinheiro da Silva, 2004, Dhamankar et al., 2004, Laera et al., 2006]. We first present the information required for providing explanations of matching and alignments (§9.1). Then, we discuss approaches to explanations of matching by examples of existing systems (§9.2). In turn, details of these approaches are provided in sequel, including default explanations (§9.3), explaining the basic matchers (§9.4), explaining the matching process (§9.5), and negotiating alignments by argumentation (§9.6).