Efficient Selection of Mappings and Automatic Quality-driven Combination of Matching Methods

The AgreementMaker system for ontology matching includes an extensible architecture that facilitates the integration and performance tuning of a variety of matching methods, an evaluation mechanism, which can make use of a reference matching or rely solely on “inherent” quality measures, and a multi-purpose user interface, which drives both the matching methods and the evaluation strategies. In this paper, we focus on two main features of AgreementMaker. The former is an optimized method that performs the selection of mappings given the similarities between entities computed by any matching algorithm, a threshold value, and the desired cardinalities of the mappings. Experiments show that our method is more efficient than the typically adopted combinatorial method. The latter is the evaluation framework, which includes three “inherent” quality measures that can be used both to evaluate matching methods when a reference matching is not available and to combine multiple matching results by defining the weighting scheme of a fully automatic combination method.