Coping with Conservativity Violations in Ontology-to-ontology Alignment in Practice

18^th March 2015, 14:00 Ashton Lecture Theater
Dr Ernesto Jimenez Ruiz and Alessandro Solimando
Information Systems Group
Department of Computer Science
Oxford University

Dipartimento di Informatica, Bioingegneria, Robotica e Ingegneria dei Sistemi
Università di Genova

Abstract

Ontologies play a key role in the development of the Semantic Web and are being used in many diverse application domains such as biomedicine and energy industry.
An application domain may have been modeled according to different points of view and purposes.
This situation usually leads to the development of different ontologies that intuitively overlap, but that use different naming and modeling conventions.
In order to enable interoperability between ontology-based systems, ontology matching techniques have been proposed. These techniques, however, rely on lexical and structural heuristics, and the integration of the input ontologies and the mappings may lead to many undesired logical consequences, causing a diminishment of the usefulness of the mappings.
We present a multi-strategy approach to detect and correct violations of the so-called conservativity principle, where novel subsumption
entailments between named concepts in one of the input ontologies are considered as unwanted.
The multi-strategy approach combines graph-theory, logic programming and the use of light-weight logical fragments, in order to achieve scalability in repair computation, even for large biomedical ontologies.