A method for recommending ontology alignment strategies

Abstract

In different areas ontologies have been developed and many of these ontologies contain overlapping information. Often we would therefore want to be able to use multiple ontologies. To obtain good results, we need to find the relationships between terms in the different ontologies, i.e. we need to align them. Currently, there already exist a number of different alignment strategies. However, it is usually difficult for a user that needs to align two ontologies to decide which of the different available strategies are the most suitable. In this paper we propose a method that provides recommendations on alignment strategies for a given alignment problem. The method is based on the evaluation of the different available alignment strategies on several small selected pieces from the ontologies, and uses the evaluation results to provide recommendations. In the paper we give the basic steps of the method, and then illustrate and discuss the method in the setting of an alignment problem with two well-known biomedical ontologies. We also experiment with different implementations of the steps in the method. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.