Aligning Controlled Vocabularies using a Facet based approach for facilitating the Linked Open Data

Abstract

A vocabulary stores words, synonyms, word sense definitions (i.e. glosses), relations between word senses and concepts; such a vocabulary is generally referred as the Controlled Vocabulary (CV) if choice or selections of terms are done by domain specialists. A facet is a distinct and dimensional feature of a concept or a term that allows taxonomy, ontology or controlled vocabulary to be viewed or ordered in multiple ways, rather than in a distinct way. The facet is also clearly defined, mutually exclusive, and composed by collectively exhaustive aspects, properties or characteristics of a domain. For example, a collection of rice might be represented using a name facet, place facet etc. In this paper an approach has been proposed where a facet has built for each concept by considering more general concepts (broader terms), less general concepts (narrow terms) or related concepts (related terms) that is to be called concept facet (CF). These CF’s have been used for mapping two controlled vocabularies. This methodology is based on hidden semantic matching which is different from the orthodox view of matching. Finally the aim is to contribute in alignment of controlled vocabulary to enrich the Linked Data version of AGROVOC with appropriate links to other thesauri.