Ontology Matching Techniques Research Articles

Impact of Agricultural Ontologies Evolution on the Alignment Preservative Adaptation

Ontology matching techniques are a solution to surmount the problem of interoperability on the fly between ontologies. However, both alignments and ontologies are likely to be evolved throughout their life cycle, which frequently degrades their qualities. One of the main features of an alignment is its conservativity, so that it should never generate new knowledge compared to those generated by reasoning solely on ontologies. We focus in this paper on the issue of adapting the fresh alignment between evolved OWL-2 ontologies while respecting the conservativity principle. We also propose several patterns to deal with the problem of detection and repair of conservativity breaches during such evolution depending on the type of change in the related OWL-2 ontologies. We use famous ontologies from the field of agriculture to validate our experimentation. At the end we present a set of open research issues.

Uncertainty in Automated Ontology Matching: Lessons from an Empirical Evaluation

Data integration is considered a classic research field and a pressing need within the information science community. Ontologies play a critical role in such processes by providing well-consolidated support to link and semantically integrate datasets via interoperability. This paper approaches data integration from an application perspective by looking at ontology matching techniques. As the manual matching of different sources of information becomes unrealistic once the system scales up, the automation of the matching process becomes a compelling need. Therefore, we have conducted experiments on actual non-semantically enriched relational data with the support of existing tools (pre-LLM technology) for automatic ontology matching from the scientific community. Even considering a relatively simple case study—i.e., the spatio–temporal alignment of macro indicators—outcomes clearly show significant uncertainty resulting from errors and inaccuracies along the automated matching process. More concretely, this paper aims to test on real-world data a bottom-up knowledge-building approach, discuss the lessons learned from the experimental results of the case study, and draw conclusions about uncertainty and uncertainty management in an automated ontology matching process. While the most common evaluation metrics clearly demonstrate the unreliability of fully automated matching solutions, properly designed semi-supervised approaches seem to be mature for more generalized application.

Similarity Feature Construction for Matching Ontologies through Adaptively Aggregating Artificial Neural Networks

Ontology is the kernel technique of Semantic Web (SW), which enables the interaction and cooperation among different intelligent applications. However, with the rapid development of ontologies, their heterogeneity issue becomes more and more serious, which hampers communications among those intelligent systems built upon them. Finding the heterogeneous entities between two ontologies, i.e., ontology matching, is an effective method of solving ontology heterogeneity problems. When matching two ontologies, it is critical to construct the entity pair’s similarity feature by comprehensively taking into consideration various similarity features, so that the identical entities can be distinguished. Due to the ability of learning complex calculating model, recently, Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is a popular method of constructing similarity features for matching ontologies. The existing ANNs construct the similarity feature in a single perspective, which could not ensure its effectiveness under diverse heterogeneous contexts. To construct an accurate similarity feature for each entity pair, in this work, we propose an adaptive aggregating method of combining different ANNs. In particular, we first propose a context-based ANN and syntax-based ANN to respectively construct two similarity feature matrices, which are then adaptively integrated to obtain a final similarity feature matrix through the Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) and Analytic hierarchy process (AHP). Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI)’s benchmark and anatomy track are used to verify the effectiveness of our method. The experimental results show that our approach’s results are better than single ANN-based ontology matching techniques and state-of-the-art ontology matching techniques.

Toward the Multilingual Semantic Web: Multilingual Ontology Matching and Assessment

The amount of multilingual data on the Web proliferates; therefore, developing ontologies in various natural languages is attracting considerable attention. In order to achieve semantic interoperability for the multilingual Web, cross-lingual ontology matching techniques are highly required. This paper proposes a Multilingual Ontology Matching (MoMatch) approach for matching ontologies in different natural languages. MoMatch uses machine translation and various string similarity techniques to identify correspondences across different ontologies. Furthermore, we propose a Quality Assessment Suite for Ontologies (QASO) that comprises 14 metrics, out of which seven metrics are used to assess the quality of the matching process and seven metrics are used to evaluate the quality of the ontology. We present an in-depth comparison of different string similarity techniques across various languages to get the most effective similarity measure(s) between multilingual terms. To illustrate the applicability of our approach and how it can be used in different domains, we present two use cases. MoMatch has been implemented using Scala and Apache Spark under an open-source license. We have compared our results with the results from the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI 2020). MoMatch has achieved significantly high precision, recall, and F-measure compared to five state-of-the-art matching approaches.

Large-scale complex ontology matching through anchor-based semantic partitioning technique and confidence matrix based evolutionary algorithm

Ontology presents a field knowledge by defining the meaning of domain concepts and relations among them. To conduct the inter-operability between two heterogeneous ontologies, we need to determine a number of entity correspondences, the so-called Ontology Matching (OM). Traditional OM techniques dedicate to find the simple correspondences which cannot sufficiently express the diverse kinds of heterogeneity, and therefore, complex correspondences are required, which maps one or multiple entities from one ontology to those from the other. Due to the semantic complexity, automatically discovering large-scale simple and complex correspondences has become a challenge. To face this challenge, in this work, an Anchor-based Semantic Partitioning Technique (ASPT) is first presented to divide the large-scale ontologies into several semantic segments, whose computational complexity is lower than the existing ontology partitioning algorithms. Then, a Pattern-based Similarity Measure (PSM) is used to distinguish both simple and complex correspondences. Finally, a Confidence Matrix based Evolutionary Algorithm (CM-EA) is proposed to efficiently match the ontology segments. We compare our proposal with EA-based matching technique and state-of-the-art ontology matching systems on OAEI’s Complex track, and the experimental results show that our approach is able to efficiently match large-scale complex ontologies.

Matching Ontologies through Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm with Relevance Matrix

The ultimate goal of semantic web (SW) is to implement mutual collaborations among ontology-based intelligent systems. To this end, it is necessary to integrate those domain-independent and cross-domain ontologies by finding the correspondences between their entities, which is the so-called ontology matching. To improve the quality of ontology alignment, in this work, the ontology matching problem is first defined as a sparse multi-objective optimization problem (SMOOP), and then, a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm with a relevance matrix (MOEA-RM) is proposed to address it. In particular, a relevance matrix (RM) is presented to adaptively measure the relevance of each individual’s genes to the objectives, which is applied in MOEA’s initialization, crossover and mutation to ensure the population’s sparsity and to speed up the the algorithm’s convergence. The experiment verifies the performance of MOEA-RM by comparing it with the state-of-the-art ontology matching techniques, and the experimental results show that MOEA-RM is able to effectively address the ontology matching problem with different heterogeneity characteristics.

Semi-Automatic Ontology Matching Based on Interactive Compact Genetic Algorithm

Ontology matching is able to identify the entity correspondences between two heterogeneous ontologies, which is an effective method to solve the data heterogeneous problem on the Semantic Web. Traditional fully-automatic ontology matching techniques suffer from the limitation of similarity measure, whose alignment’s quality cannot be ensured. To overcome this drawback, in this work, an Interactive Compact Genetic Algorithm (ICGA)-based ontology matching technique is proposed, which utilizes both the compact encoding mechanism and expert interacting mechanism to improve the algorithm’s performance and the alignment’s quality. In addition, an optimization model is established to formally define the ontology entity matching problem, and an efficient interacting strategy is proposed, which is able to reduce the expert’s workload and maximize his working value. The experiment uses Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI)’s benchmark to test our proposal’s performance. The experimental results show that our approach is able to make use of the expert knowledge to improve the alignment’s quality, and it also outperforms OAEI’s participants.

Solving Sensor Ontology Metamatching Problem with Compact Flower Pollination Algorithm

To implement co-operation among applications on the Internet of Things (IoT), we need to describe the meaning of diverse sensor data with the sensor ontology. However, there exists a heterogeneity issue among different sensor ontologies, which hampers their communications. Sensor ontology matching is a feasible solution to this problem, which is able to map the identical ontology entity pairs. This work investigates the sensor ontology meta-matching problem, which indirectly optimizes the sensor ontology alignment’s quality by tuning the weights to aggregate different ontology matchers. Due to the largescale entity and their complex semantic relationships, swarm intelligence (SI) based techniques are emerging as a popular approach to optimize the sensor ontology alignment. Inspired by the success of the flower pollination algorithm (FPA) in the IoT domain, this work further proposes a compact FPA (CFPA), which introduces the compact encoding mechanism to improve the algorithm’s efficiency, and on this basis, the compact exploration and exploitation operators are proposed, and an adaptive switching probability is presented to trade-off these two searching strategies. The experiment uses the ontology alignment evaluation initiative (OAEI)’s benchmark and the real sensor ontologies to test CFPA’s performance. The statistical comparisons show that CFPA significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art sensor ontology matching techniques.

Matching heterogeneous ontologies with adaptive evolutionary algorithm

An ontology provides a formal description on the domain concepts and their relationships. Due to the subjectivity of ontology engineers, one concept might be expressed in various ways, yielding the so-called ontology heterogeneity problem, and ontology matching is a ground method to address this problem. Ontology matching technique uses the similarity measure to determine the correspondences between two heterogeneous ontology entities. In order to improve the quality of ontology alignment, it is necessary to combine different kinds of similarity measures, and how to optimize the aggregating weights is called the ontology meta-matching problem. Tin this work, a heuristic evaluating metric on the ontology alignment is presented to evaluate the ontology alignment's quality, and a mathematical model on ontology meta-matching problem is constructed. Then, an Adaptive Evolutionary Algorithm (AEA) is proposed to effectively solve this problem. In particular, when the elite solution remains unchanged, AEA adaptively activates three independent exploring strategies, which, respectively use the adaptive selection, crossover and mutation operators based on the population diversity metric. In the experiment, we compare AEA among EA based matching technique and the state-of-the-art ontology matching technique, and the experimental results show its effectiveness.

Biomedical Ontology Matching Through Attention-Based Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Network

Biomedical ontology formally defines the biomedical entities and their relationships. However, the same biomedical entity in different biomedical ontologies might be defined in diverse contexts, resulting in the problem of biomedicine semantic heterogeneity. It is necessary to determine the mappings between heterogeneous biomedical entities to bridge the semantic gap, which is the so-called biomedical ontology matching. Due to the plentiful semantic meaning and flexible representation of biomedical entities, the biomedical ontology matching problem is still an open challenge in terms of the alignment's quality. To face this challenge, in this work, the biomedical ontology matching problem is deemed as a binary classification problem, and an attention-based bidirectional long short-term memory network (At-BLSTM)-based ontology matching technique is presented to address it, which is able to capture the semantic and contextual feature of biomedical entities. In the experiment, the comparisons with state-of-the-art approaches show the effectiveness of the proposal.

Semisupervised Learning-Based Sensor Ontology Matching

Sensor ontology models the sensor information and knowledge in a machine-understandable way, which aims at addressing the data heterogeneity problem on the Internet of Things (IoT). However, the existing sensor ontologies are maintained independently for different requirements, which might define the same concept with different terms or context, yielding the heterogeneity issue. Since the complex semantic relationship between the sensor concepts and the large-scale entities is to be dealt with, finding the identical entity correspondences is an error-prone task. To effectively determine the sensor entity correspondences, this work proposes a semisupervised learning-based sensor ontology matching technique. First, we borrow the idea of “centrality” from the social network to construct the training examples; then, we present an evolutionary algorithm- (EA-) based metamatching technique to train the model of aggregating different similarity measures; finally, we use the trained model to match the rest entities. The experiment uses the benchmark as well as three real sensor ontologies to test our proposal’s performance. The experimental results show that our approach is able to determine high-quality sensor entity correspondences in all matching tasks.

Matching sensor ontologies through siamese neural networks without using reference alignment.

Sensors have been growingly used in a variety of applications. The lack of semantic information of obtained sensor data will bring about the heterogeneity problem of sensor data in semantic, schema, and syntax levels. To solve the heterogeneity problem of sensor data, it is necessary to carry out the sensor ontology matching process to determine correspondences among heterogeneous sensor concepts. In this paper, we propose a Siamese Neural Network based Ontology Matching technique (SNN-OM) to align the sensor ontologies, which does not require the utilization of reference alignment to train the network model. In particular, a representative concepts extraction method is presented to enhance the model’s performance and reduce the time of the training process, and an alignment refining method is proposed to enhance the alignments’ quality by removing the logically conflict correspondences. The experimental results show that SNN-OM is capable of efficiently determining high-quality sensor ontology alignments.

Aggregating Heterogeneous Sensor Ontologies with Fuzzy Debate Mechanism

Aiming at enhancing the communication and information security between the next generation of Industrial Internet of Things (Nx-IIoT) sensor networks, it is critical to aggregate heterogeneous sensor data in the sensor ontologies by establishing semantic connections in diverse sensor ontologies. Sensor ontology matching technology is devoted to determining heterogeneous sensor concept pairs in two distinct sensor ontologies, which is an effective method of addressing the heterogeneity problem. The existing matching techniques neglect the relationships among different entity mapping, which makes them unable to make sure of the alignment’s high quality. To get rid of this shortcoming, in this work, a sensor ontology extraction method technology using Fuzzy Debate Mechanism (FDM) is proposed to aggregate the heterogeneous sensor data, which determines the final sensor concept correspondences by carrying out a debating process among different matchers. More than ever, a fuzzy similarity metric is presented to effectively measure two entities’ similarity values by membership function. It first uses the fuzzy membership function to model two entities’ similarity in vector space and then calculate their semantic distance with the cosine function. The testing cases from Bibliographic data which is furnished by the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) and six sensor ontology matching tasks are used to evaluate the performance of our scheme in the experiment. The robustness and effectiveness of the proposed method are proved by comparing it with the advanced ontology matching techniques.

Optimizing Ontology Alignment Through an Interactive Compact Genetic Algorithm

Ontology provides a shared vocabulary of a domain by formally representing the meaning of its concepts, the properties they possess, and the relations among them, which is the state-of-the-art knowledge modeling technique. However, the ontologies in the same domain could differ in conceptual modeling and granularity level, which yields the ontology heterogeneity problem. To enable data and knowledge transfer, share, and reuse between two intelligent systems, it is important to bridge the semantic gap between the ontologies through the ontology matching technique. To optimize the ontology alignment’s quality, this article proposes an Interactive Compact Genetic Algorithm (ICGA)-based ontology matching technique, which consists of an automatic ontology matching process based on a Compact Genetic Algorithm (CGA) and a collaborative user validating process based on an argumentation framework. First, CGA is used to automatically match the ontologies, and when it gets stuck in the local optima, the collaborative validation based on the multi-relationship argumentation framework is activated to help CGA jump out of the local optima. In addition, we construct a discrete optimization model to define the ontology matching problem and propose a hybrid similarity measure to calculate two concepts’ similarity value. In the experiment, we test the performance of ICGA with the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative’s interactive track, and the experimental results show that ICGA can effectively determine the ontology alignments with high quality.

Matching Transportation Ontologies with Word2Vec and Alignment Extraction Algorithm

The development of intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) faces the challenge of integrating data from multiple unrelated sources. As one of the core technologies of knowledge integration in ITS, an ontology typically provides a normative definition of transportation domain that can be used as a reference for information integration. However, due to the subjectivity of domain experts, a concept may be expressed in multiple ways, yielding the ontology heterogeneity problem. Ontology matching (OM) is an effective method of addressing it, which is of help to further realize the mutual communication between the ontology-based ITSs. In this work, we first propose to use Word2Vec to model the entities in vector space and calculate their similarity values. Then, a stable marriage-based alignment extraction algorithm is presented to determine high-quality alignment. In the experiment, the performance of the proposal is tested by using the benchmark track of OAEI and real transportation ontologies. The experimental results show that our approach is able to obtain higher quality alignment results than OAEI’s participants and other state-of-the-art ontology matching techniques.

Efficient User Involvement in Semiautomatic Ontology Matching

Semiautomatic ontology matching poses a new challenge of how to implement an efficient user interactions. To address this challenge, we answer three questions in this paper: (1) when should we activate the interacting process; (2) which correspondences should be presented for user validation; and (3) how to make use of the validating results. In particular, we present an interactive compact memetic algorithm (ICMA) based semiautomatic ontology matching technique to: (1) determine the timing of getting a user involved; (2) determine the problematic correspondences; and (3) propagate the user validating results. The experimental results show that three proposed strategies can effectively reduce the user's workload and the algorithm's runtime, increase the alignment's quality, and the performance of ICMA outperforms the state-of-the-art semiautomatic ontology matching techniques.

Matching large-scale biomedical ontologies with central concept based partitioning algorithm and Adaptive Compact Evolutionary Algorithm

As a unified model for describing biomedical knowledge, a biomedical ontology is of help to solve the issues of data heterogeneity in different biomedical databases. However, these ontologies might model same biomedical knowledge differently, yielding the heterogeneity problem. To address the biomedical ontology heterogeneity problem, it is necessary to match the heterogeneous concept pairs between two ontologies. How to reduce the computational complexity is a challenging problem when matching large-scale biomedical ontologies, which directly affects the matching efficiency and the alignment’s quality. To face this challenge, this work proposes a large-scale biomedical ontology partitioning and matching framework. In our proposal, a central concepts based ontology partitioning algorithm is first used to divide the ontology into several disjoint segments, which borrows the idea from the social network and Firefly Algorithm (FA). The proposed algorithm is able to partition the ontologies with low computation complexity, and at the same time, ensure the semantic completeness and the decent scale of each segment. Then, an Adaptive Compact Evolutionary Algorithm (ACEA) based matching technique is utilized to determine the ontology segment alignments, which can efficiently match the similar ontology segments. The experiment utilizes the biomedical testing cases provided by Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) to test our approach’s effectiveness, and the experimental results show that the alignments obtained by our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art biomedical ontology matching techniques.

MPP-MLO: Multilevel Parallel Partitioning for Efficiently Matching Large Ontologies

The growing usage of Semantic Web has resulted in an increasing number, size and heterogeneity of ontologies on the web. Therefore, the necessity of ontology matching techniques, which could solve these issues, is highly required. Due to high computational requirements, scalability is always a major concern in ontology matching system. In this work, a partition-based ontology matching system is proposed, which deals with parallel partitioning of the ontologies at multilevel. At first level, the root based ontology partitioning is proposed. Matchable Sub-ontologies pair is generated using an efficient linguistic matcher (IEI-Sub) to uncover anchors and then based on maximum similarity value, pairs are generated. However, a distributed and parallel approach of MapReduce-based SEI-sub process has been proposed to efficiently handle the anchor discovery process which is highly time-consuming. In second level partitioning, an efficient approach is proposed to form non overlapping clusters. Extensive experimental evaluation is done by comparing existing approaches with the proposed approach, and the results shows that MPP-MLO turns out to be an efficient and scalable ontology matching system.

Optimizing Ontology Alignment through Linkage Learning on Entity Correspondences

Data heterogeneity is the obstacle for the resource sharing on Semantic Web (SW), and ontology is regarded as a solution to this problem. However, since different ontologies are constructed and maintained independently, there also exists the heterogeneity problem between ontologies. Ontology matching is able to identify the semantic correspondences of entities in different ontologies, which is an effective method to address the ontology heterogeneity problem. Due to huge memory consumption and long runtime, the performance of the existing ontology matching techniques requires further improvement. In this work, an extended compact genetic algorithm‐based ontology entity matching technique (ECGA‐OEM) is proposed, which uses both the compact encoding mechanism and linkage learning approach to match the ontologies efficiently. Compact encoding mechanism does not need to store and maintain the whole population in the memory during the evolving process, and the utilization of linkage learning protects the chromosome’s building blocks, which is able to reduce the algorithm’s running time and ensure the alignment’s quality. In the experiment, ECGA‐OEM is compared with the participants of ontology alignment evaluation initiative (OAEI) and the state‐of‐the‐art ontology matching techniques, and the experimental results show that ECGA‐OEM is both effective and efficient.

Integrating Sensor Ontologies with Global and Local Alignment Extractions

In order to enhance the communication between sensor networks in the Internet of things (IoT), it is indispensable to establish the semantic connections between sensor ontologies in this field. For this purpose, this paper proposes an up‐and‐coming sensor ontology integrating technique, which uses debate mechanism (DM) to extract the sensor ontology alignment from various alignments determined by different matchers. In particular, we use the correctness factor of each matcher to determine a correspondence’s global factor, and utilize the support strength and disprove strength in the debating process to calculate its local factor. Through comprehensively considering these two factors, the judgment factor of an entity mapping can be obtained, which is further applied in extracting the final sensor ontology alignment. This work makes use of the bibliographic track provided by the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) and five real sensor ontologies in the experiment to assess the performance of our method. The comparing results with the most advanced ontology matching techniques show the robustness and effectiveness of our approach.