A session-based ontology alignment approach enabling user involvement

One of the current challenges in ontology alignment is the user involvement in the alignment process. To obtain high-quality alignments user involvement is needed for validation of matching results as well as in the mapping generation process. Further, there is a need for supporting the user in tasks such as matcher selection, combination and tuning. In this paper we introduce a conceptual ontology alignment framework that enables user involvement in a natural way. This is achieved by introducing different kinds of interruptible sessions. The framework allows partial computations for generating mapping suggestions, partial validations of mapping suggestions, recommendations for alignment strategies as well as the use of validation decisions in the (re-)computation of mapping suggestions and the recommendations. Further, we show the feasibility of the approach by implementing a session-based version of an existing system. We also show through experiments the advantages of our approach for ontology alignment as well as for evaluation of ontology alignment strategies.