Automated Alignment of Ontologies

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What is Automated Ontology Alignment?
An example ontology alignment.

The problem of ontology matching is crucial since we are witnessing a decentralized development and publication of ontological data. Automating the ontology alignment process is demanded by interoperability on the web. Ontologies are formalizations of commonly agreed upon knowledge, often specific to a domain. An ontology consists of a set of concepts and relationships between the concepts, and these are typically organized in the form of a directed graph.

Automated Ontology Alignment is an automated process of finding ‘mappings’ (correspondence) between nodes (classes) and edges (properties) from one ontology to the other ontology. Mappings could be one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many. An example mapping between two ontologies from military domain is shown in the figure.

Project Description

Our group has developed an ontology alignment framework named Optima. Optima is a state of the art general purpose tool, which aims at performing ontology alignment that automatically identifies and matches relevant concepts between ontologies. The tool is supported by an intuitive user interface that facilitates the visualization and analysis of ontologies in N3, RDF and OWL and the alignment results. This is an open source ontology alignment frame work. Optima is also available as a plug-in to the Protégé ontology editor.

Project Generated Resources
  • License: GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
  • API: Source Optima+ API 4.5
    • Includes three JAVA projects
      • Graph: Builds graph from owl/rdf ontologies.
      • OntoSim: Similarity library for ontology concepts
      • Optima+: The ontology alignment tool - Optima+
  • Sample Code: Sample JAVA project using Optima+ API 4.5
  • Optima+ Binary: binary
    • unzip the binary
    • go to the unzipped directory
    • run optima.jar:
    • align ontologies from web:
      java -jar optima.jar
      -s http://oaei.ontologymatching.org/2011/benchmarks/101/onto.rdf
      -t http://oaei.ontologymatching.org/2011/benchmarks/252/onto.rdf
      -o output252.rdf --sage
    • align ontologies from file system:
      java -jar optima.jar -s file:/D:/benchmarks/101/onto.rdf -t file:/D:/benchmarks/252/onto.rdf -o output252.rdf --sage
    • To see the help message:
      java -jar optima.jar

      usage: optima
      -a,--anon disable modeling anonymous nodes
      -b,--sage enable SAGE (Space Alternative Generalized EM)
      -d,--debug print debugging information
      -h,--help print this message
      -i <iterations> # of iterations
      -o,--out <file> output file
      -property <file> property file
      -q,--quiet be extra quiet
      -s,--source <uri> source ontology
      -S <samples> # of samples
      -t,--target <uri> target ontology
      -v,--version print the version information and exit
  • Documentation: JAVA Doc
  • A Protégé plug-in version and a stand-alone graphical version are available on request.


Collaborating Institutions
  • THINC LAB, Department of Computer Science, University of Georgia.
  • KNO.E.SIS Center, College of Engineering and Computer Science, Wright State University.
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