Complex ontology alignment for autonomous systems via the Compact Co-Evolutionary Brain Storm Optimization algorithm

Abstract

Autonomous Systems (ASs) that work in the open, dynamic environment are required to share their data entities and semantics to implement the co-operations. Typically, AS’s data schemas and semantics are described via ontology. Since ASs need to maintain their autonomy and conceptual specificity, their ontologies might define one concept with different terms or in different contexts, which yields the heterogeneity issue and hampers their co-operations. An effective solution is to establish a set of data entity’s correspondences through the Ontology Alignment (OA). Sine the simple correspondence of one-to-one style lacks expressiveness and cannot completely cover different types of heterogeneity, ASs’ co-operations require using the complex correspondence of one-to-many or many-to-may style. Inspired by the success of applying the Brain Storm Optimization algorithm (BSO) to solve diverse complex optimization problems, this work proposes a Compact Co-Evolutionary BSO (CCBSO) to face the challenge of aligning AS ontologies. In particular, the AS ontology aligning problem is formally defined, a hybrid confidence measure for distinguishing the simple and complex correspondences is proposed, and a problem-specific CCBSO is presented. The experiment tests CCBSO’s performance on different AS ontology aligning tasks, which consist of two simple ontology aligning tasks and one complex ontology aligning track. The experimental results show that CCBSO outperforms the state-of-the-art ontology aligning techniques on all simple and complex ontology aligning tasks.