Ontology matching for dynamic publication in semantic portals

Abstract

Semantic portals are characterized for storing and structuring content according to specific domain ontologies. This content is represented through ontological languages, which enable not only adding semantic value to information treatment, but also inferring new knowledge from it. Publication in a semantic portal is typically done by instantiating its ontology, and this is often performed manually or through the use of specific forms. However, in order to keep portals constantly up-to-date, it is necessary to provide means for a more dynamic publication, integrating the portal content with information retrieved from different ontology-based sites on the same or on complementary domains. Reusing information from different ontologies requires specific and efficient mechanisms to align them, taking into account syntactical and semantical conflicts. This paper proposes an extension of the Crosi Mapping System, a matching mechanism which calculates similarities between ontologies. Some of its original algorithms have been enriched with additional functionality. This extension, named e-CMS, has been evaluated using the OAEI ontology alignment benchmark, and results show an increase of 69% in alignment precision when compared to the CMS original version. In order to illustrate its use, the e-CMS strategy was applied to SiGePoS, a System for Generating Semantic Portals. The semantic module, one of the system components, implements the alignment mechanism between ontologies, which is performed by the e-CMS.