Framework for Ontology Alignment and Mapping

Semantic alignment between ontologies is a necessary precondition to establish interoperability between agents or services using different individual ontologies. This cannot be done manually beyond a certain complexity and size of ontologies. The core contribution in this article is the Framework for Ontology Alignment and Mapping (FOAM). With FOAM we address requirements from an application-based perspective such as high quality results, efficiency, high degree of automation with optional user-interaction, flexibility with respect to use cases, and easy adjusting and parameterizing. FOAM consists of a general alignment process based on the ontology-encoded semantics, different instantiations of the process focusing on various aspects of ontology alignment, and finally the concrete implementation as a powerful but easy to use Open Source tool. The evaluation results show that the different instantiations individually outperform existing approaches. However, best results can be gained when combining them. We expect that the findings suit not only the Semantic Web community, but may solve integration problems of related computer science fields as well.