Optimizing ontology alignment through Memetic Algorithm based on Partial Reference Alignment

Abstract

All the state of the art approaches based on evolutionary algorithm (EA) for addressing the meta-matching problem in ontology alignment require the domain expert to provide a reference alignment (RA) between two ontologies in advance. Since the RA is very expensive to obtain especially when the scale of ontology is very large, in this paper, we propose to use the Partial Reference Alignment (PRA) built by clustering-based approach to take the place of RA in the process of using evolutionary approach. Then a problem-specific Memetic Algorithm (MA) is proposed to address the meta-matching problem by optimizing the aggregation of three different basic similarity measures (Syntactic Measure, Linguistic Measure and Taxonomy based Measure) into a single similarity metric. The experimental results have shown that using PRA constructed by our approach in most cases leads to higher quality of solution than using PRA built in randomly selecting classes from ontology and the quality of solution is very close to the approach using RA where the precision value of solution is generally high. Comparing to the state of the art ontology matching systems, our approach is able to obtain more accurate results. Moreover, our approach’s performance is better than GOAL approach based on Genetic Algorithm (GA) and RA with the average improvement up to 50.61%. Therefore, the proposed approach is both effective.