Alignment Evolution under Ontology Change

Abstract

The alignment of ontologies is the backbone of semantic interoperability. It facilitates the import of data from an ontology to another, translating queries between them or merging ontologies in a global one. However, these services cannot be guaranteed throughout the life cycle of the ontology. The problem is that the evolution of mapped ontologies may be affected and make obsolete the relationship of the mapping. Inspired by belief revision theory, the authors identify and formalize the constraints and requirements of the alignment evolution problem. Then they give an orchestration of designed operations to resolve the problem. The satisfaction of these constraints and requirements is discussed for each operation showing its strengths and weaknesses. Finally, the authors conduct an experimental process with the objective to show the limits of alignment evolution methods and ontology matching tools when dealing with alignment evolution problem highlighting the emergency to invest in dedicated methods.

Conservativity Principle Violations for Ontology Alignment: Survey and Trends

“…Thus, a named concept or property C #i with i = {1, 2} is unsatisfiable due to A with respect to O 1 ii. Ontology change preservation problem [28] defines the notion of conserving the changed meaning to refer the control of the propagation of knowledge fro m one version to another which is one of the known activity of align ment. If this propagation is not controlled, it can affect the mean ing of ontological elements.…”

“…However, [28] addresses a more co mplicated problem: Ontology change preservation, which needs more sophisticated violations detection processes. the rest of the compared systems here ( [13] and [23]) solve the conservativity problem with d ifferent degrees, since that [23] deals with conservativity principle v iolations at only the concept hierarchy level within the input ontologies, and therefore it cannot covers all types of violations even those concerning ontology change preservation.…”

“…For detecting ontology change preservation violation, [28] considers that initial align ment cannot be coherent. Because, some correspondences propagate axio ms fro m one ontology version to another; this violates the constraint of conserving the changed meaning.…”

“…In the case of mu ltiple options, the mapping confidence will be used as a differentiating factor 6 . The signature element that has the less intentional persistent with respect to the relevance relation allows to choose the correspondence to be eliminated fro m the init ial alignment [28]. When two of the signature elements have the same degree of intentional persistence, the choice is left to the user.…”

“…[19] and [12] were the subject of the highest number of scientific productions. The smallest nu mber of papers was devoted to the approaches [10] and [28].…”