Ontology Alignment Quality: A Framework and Tool for Validation

Recently semantic web technologies, such as ontologies, have been proposed as key enablers for integrating heterogeneous data schemas in business and governmental systems. Algorithms designed to align different but related ontologies have become necessary as differing ontologies proliferate. The process of ontology alignment seeks to find corresponding entities in a second ontology with the same or the closest meaning for each entity in a single ontology. This research is motivated by the need to provide tools and techniques to support the task of validating ontology alignment statements, since it cannot be guaranteed that the results from automated tools are accurate. The authors present a framework for understanding ontology alignment quality and describe how AlViz, a tool for visual ontology alignment, may be used to improve the quality of alignment results. An experiment was undertaken to test the claim that AlViz supports the task of validating ontology alignments. A promising result found that the tool has potential for identifying missing alignments and for rejecting false alignments.