Evaluation of the Ontology Instance Migration Methodology and Solution in Industrial Settings

Abstract

The recent growth in maturity of semantic technologies has led to a substantially wider adoption of semantics enabled solutions in industries. These solutions typically include knowledge specifications in the form of different ontologies. Semantic heterogeneity can be resolved by applying ontology alignment methods to these ontologies. Therefore the development of the industrial strength software tools for solving different ontology alignment problems becomes important in the research and development. One of the practically important problems in the pool is the ontology instance migration problem. The paper presents the results of the evaluation of our solution of the ontology instance migration problem in industrial settings. The solution follows an iterative incremental approach involving a knowledge engineer as a process supervisor. Technically, the problem is solved by (i) automatically computing the structural difference between the schemas of ontologies; (ii) automatically generating the transformation rules for the individual assertions; (iii) automatically transforming the assertions; and (iv) manually controlling the completeness of those transformations and resolving problem cases. The solution has been evaluated by applying it to the ontologies in (i) libraries; and (ii) construction industry. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013.