Matching Sensor Ontologies with Simulated Annealing Particle Swarm Optimization

Abstract

In recent years, innovative positioning and mobile communication techniques have been developing to achieve Location-Based Services (LBSs). With the help of sensors, LBS is able to detect and sense the information from the outside world to provide location-related services. To implement the intelligent LBS, it is necessary to develop the Semantic Sensor Web (SSW), which makes use of the sensor ontologies to implement the sensor data interoperability, information sharing, and knowledge fusion among intelligence systems. Due to the subjectivity of sensor ontology engineers, the heterogeneity problem is introduced, which hampers the communications among these sensor ontologies. To address this problem, sensor ontology matching is introduced to establish the corresponding relationship between different sensor terms. Among all ontology matching technologies, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) can represent a contributing method to deal with the low-quality ontology alignment problem. For the purpose of further enhancing the quality of matching results, in our work, sensor ontology matching is modeled as the meta-matching problem firstly, and then based on this model, aiming at various similarity measures, a Simulated Annealing PSO (SAPSO) is proposed to optimize their aggregation weights and the threshold. In particular, the approximate evaluation metrics for evaluating quality of alignment without reference are proposed, and a Simulated Annealing (SA) strategy is applied to PSO’s evolving process, which is able to help the algorithm avoid the local optima and enhance the quality of solution. The well-known Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative’s benchmark (OAEI’s benchmark) and three real sensor ontologies are used to verify the effectiveness of SAPSO. The experimental results show that SAPSO is able to effectively match the sensor ontologies.