Breaking rules: taking Complex Ontology Alignment beyond rule­based approaches

Tese de mestrado, Ciência de Dados, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2021As ontologies are developed in an uncoordinated manner, differences in scope and design compromise interoperability. Ontology matching is critical to address this semantic heterogeneity problem, as it finds correspondences that enable integrating data across the Semantic Web. One of the biggest challenges in this field is that ontology schemas often differ conceptually, and therefore reconciling many real¬world ontology pairs (e.g., in geography or biomedicine) involves establishing complex mappings that contain multiple entities from each ontology. Yet, for the most part, ontology matching algorithms are restricted to finding simple equivalence mappings between ontology entities. This work presents novel algorithms for Complex Ontology Alignment based on Association Rule Mining over a set of shared instances between two ontologies. Its strategy relies on a targeted search for known complex patterns in instance and schema data, reducing the search space. This allows the application of semantic¬based filtering algorithms tailored to each kind of pattern, to select and refine the most relevant mappings. The algorithms were evaluated in OAEI Complex track datasets under two automated approaches: OAEI’s entity¬based approach and a novel element¬overlap–based approach which was developed in the context of this work. The algorithms were able to find mappings spanning eight distinct complex patterns, as well as combinations of patterns through disjunction and conjunction. They were able to efficiently reduce the search space and showed competitive performance results comparing to the State of the Art of complex alignment systems. As for the comparative analysis of evaluation methodologies, the proposed element¬overlap–based evaluation strategy was shown to be more accurate and interpretable than the reference-based automatic alternative, although none of the existing strategies fully address the challenges discussed in the literature. For future work, it would be interesting to extend the algorithms to cover more complex patterns and combine them with lexical approaches