A novel ontology matching approach using key concepts

Abstract

Purpose – Ontologies are used to formally describe the concepts within a domain in a machine-understandable way. Matching of heterogeneous ontologies is often essential for many applications like semantic annotation, query answering or ontology integration. Some ontologies may include a large number of entities which make the ontology matching process very complex in terms of the search space and execution time requirements. The purpose of this paper is to present a technique for finding degree of similarity between ontologies that trims down the search space by eliminating the ontology concepts that have less likelihood of being matched. Design/methodology/approach – Algorithms are written for finding key concepts, concept matching and relationship matching. WordNet is used for solving synonym problems during the matching process. The technique is evaluated using the reference alignments between ontologies from ontology alignment evaluation initiative benchmark in terms of degree of similarity, Pearson’s correlation coefficient and IR measures precision, recall and F-measure. Findings – Positive correlation between the degree of similarity and degree of similarity (reference alignment) and computed values of precision, recall and F-measure showed that if only key concepts of ontologies are compared, a time and search space efficient ontology matching system can be developed. Originality/value – On the basis of the present novel approach for ontology matching, it is concluded that using key concepts for ontology matching gives comparable results in reduced time and space.