Most libraries and other cultural heritage institutions use controlled knowledge organisation systems, such as thesauri, to describe their collections. Unfortunately, as most of these institutions use different such systems, unified access to heterogeneous collections is difficult. Things are even worse in an international context when concepts have labels in different languages. In order to overcome the multilingual interoperability problem between European Libraries, extensive work has been done to manually map concepts from different knowledge organisation systems, which is a tedious and expensive process.Within the TELplus project, we developed and evaluated methods to automatically discover these mappings, using different ontology matching techniques. In experiments on major French, English and German subject heading lists Rameau, LCSH and SWD, we show that we can automatically produce mappings of surprisingly good quality, even when using relatively naive translation and matching methods.

The ontology matching (OM) problem is an important barrier to achieve true Semantic Interoperability. Instance-based ontology matching (IBOM) uses the extension of concepts, the instances directly associated with a concept, to determine whether a pair of concepts is related or not. While IBOM has many strengths it requires instances that are associated with concepts of both ontologies, (i.e) dually annotated instances. In practice, however, instances are often associated with concepts of a single ontology only, rendering IBOM rarely applicable. In this paper we discuss a method that enables IBOM to be used on two disjoint datasets, thus making it far more generically applicable. This is achieved by enriching instances of each dataset with the conceptual annotations of the most similar instances from the other dataset, creating artificially dually annotated instances. We call this technique instance-based ontology matching by instance enrichment (IBOMbIE ). We have applied the IBOMbIE algorithm in a real-life use-case where large datasets are used to match the ontologies of European libraries. Existing gold standards and dually annotated instances are used to test the impact and significance of several design choices of the IBOMbIE algorithm. Finally, we compare the IBOMbIE algorithm to other ontology matching algorithms.

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