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Ontology alignment design patterns

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Abstract

Interoperability between heterogeneous ontological descriptions can be performed through ontology mediation techniques. At the heart of ontology mediation lies the alignment: a specification of correspondences between ontology entities. Ontology matching can bring some automation but are limited to finding simple correspondences. Design patterns have proven themselves useful to capture experience in design problems. In this article, we introduce ontology alignment patterns as reusable templates of recurring correspondences. Based on a detailed analysis of frequent ontology mismatches, we develop a library of common patterns. Ontology alignment patterns can be used to refine correspondences, either by the alignment designer or via pattern detection algorithms. We distinguish three levels of abstraction for ontology alignment representation, going from executable transformation rules, to concrete correspondences between two ontologies, to ontology alignment patterns at the third level. We express patterns using an ontology alignment representation language, making them ready to use in practical mediation tasks. We extract mismatches from vocabularies associated with data sets published as linked open data, and we evaluate the ability of correspondence patterns to provide proper alignments for these mismatches. Finally, we describe an application of ontology alignment patterns for an ontology transformation service.

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Notes

  1. Friend of A Friend: http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/.

  2. vCard: http://www.w3.org/TR/vcard-rdf.

  3. These languages are W3C standards described in http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/.

  4. Note that one should not mix patterns in knowledge engineering as in this paper, and patterns in data mining, as for example in [42].

  5. The language description is available at http://alignapi.gforge.inria.fr/language.html.

  6. See for example the alignment API alignapi.gforge.inria.fr/.

  7. OAEI: http://oaei.ontologymatching.org.

  8. http://thedatahub.org/group/lodcloud.

  9. All data for this experiment such as rdf or n3 dumps for each example, statistics and alignment patterns instances are available at: http://nb.vse.cz/~svabo/KAIS2012/.

  10. For the sake of brevity, we only place square brackets.

  11. For the sake of brevity, we use abstract syntax.

  12. In our analysis, we considered not only entities from DBpedia schema but also others which were present in an DBpedia instance description, e.g., yago ontology.

  13. Tool is available at: http://owl.vse.cz:8080/.

  14. This is based on online example dealing with ontology matching use case available at: http://owl.vse.cz:8080/tutorial/node37.html.

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Acknowledgments

Ondřej Zamazal has been partially supported by the CSF Grant No. P202/10/1825.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut National de Recherche, en Informatique et Automatique, Montpellier, France

    François Scharffe

  2. University of Economics, Prague, Czech Republic

    Ondřej Zamazal

  3. University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

    Dieter Fensel

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  1. François Scharffe
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  3. Dieter Fensel
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Correspondence to François Scharffe.

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Scharffe, F., Zamazal, O. & Fensel, D. Ontology alignment design patterns. Knowl Inf Syst 40, 1–28 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-013-0633-y

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