Ontology Alignment Using Web Linked Ontologies as Background Knowledge

This paper proposes an ontology matching method for aligning a source ontology with target ontologies already published and linked on the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud. This method relies on the refinement of a set of input alignments generated by existing ontology matching methods. Since the ontologies to be aligned can be expressed in several representation languages with different levels of expressiveness and the existing ontology matching methods can only be applied to some representation languages, the first step of our method consists in applying existing matching methods to as many ontology variants as possible. We then propose to apply two main strategies to refine the initial alignment set: the removal of different kinds of ambiguities between correspondences and the use of the links published on the LOD. We illustrate our proposal in the field of life sciences and environment.