Applying Logical Constraints to Ontology Matching

Automatically discovering semantic relations between ontologies is an important task with respect to overcoming semantic heterogeneity on the semantic web. Ontology matching systems, however, often produce erroneous mappings. In this paper we propose a method for optimizing precision and recall of existing matching systems. The principle of this method is based on the idea that it is possible to infer logical constraints by comparing subsumption relations between concepts of the ontologies to be matched. In order to verify this principle we implemented a system that uses our method as basis for optimizing mappings. We generated a set of synthetic ontologies and corresponding defective mappings and studied the behavior of our method with respect to the properties of the matching problem. The results show that our strategy actually improves the quality of the generated mappings.