A terminological search algorithm for ontology matching

Abstract

Most of the ontology alignment tools use terminological techniques as the initial step and then apply the structural techniques to refine the results. Since each terminological similarity measure considers some features of similarity, ontology alignment systems require exploiting different measures. While a great deal of effort has been devoted to developing various terminological similarity measures and also developing various ontology alignment systems, little attention has been paid to develop similarity search algorithms which exploit different similarity measures in order to gain benefits and avoid limitations. We propose a novel terminological search algorithm which tries to find an entity similar to an input search string in a given ontology. This algorithm extends the search string by creating a matrix from its synonym and hypernyms. The algorithm employs and combines different kind of similarity measures in different situations to achieve a higher performance, accuracy, and stability in comparison with previous methods which either use one measure or combine more measures in a naive ways such as averaging. We evaluated the algorithm using a subset of OAEI Bench mark data set. Results showed the superiority of proposed algorithm and effectiveness of different applied techniques such as word sense disambiguation and semantic filtering mechanism.