Due to continuous evolution of biomedical data, biomedical ontologies are becoming larger and more complex, which leads to the existence of many overlapping information. To support semantic inter-operability between ontology-based biomedical systems, it is necessary to identify the correspondences between these information, which is commonly known as biomedical ontology matching. However, it is a challenge to match biomedical ontologies, which dues to: (1) biomedical ontologies often possess tens of thousands of entities, (2) biomedical terminologies are complex and ambiguous. To efficiently match biomedical ontologies, in this paper, an interactive biomedical ontology matching approach is proposed, which utilizes the Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) to implement the automatic matching process, and gets a user involved in the evolving process to improve the matching efficiency. In particular, we propose an Evolutionary Tabu Search (ETS) algorithm, which can improve EA’s performance by introducing the tabu search algorithm as a local search strategy into the evolving process. On this basis, we further make the ETS-based ontology matching technique cooperate with the user in a reasonable amount of time to efficiently create high quality alignments, and make use of EA’s survival of the fittest to eliminate the wrong correspondences brought by erroneous user validations. The experiment is conducted on the Anatomy track and Large Biomedic track that are provided by the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI), and the experimental results show that our approach is able to efficiently exploit the user intervention to improve its non-interactive version, and the performance of our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-automatic ontology matching systems.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.