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Aligning Ontologies, Evaluating Concept Similarities and Visualizing Results

  • Conference paper
Journal on Data Semantics V

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((JODS,volume 3870))

Abstract

Ontologies have been created for many different subjects and by independent groups around the world. The nonexistence of a commonly accepted and used general purpose upper-ontology makes it difficult to integrate these ontologies through merge and alignment operations. The majority of the algorithms proposed so far rely on syntactic analysis, disregarding the structural properties of the source ontologies. In our previous work, we proposed an alignment method that considers the structural properties of an upper-ontology constructed using a thesaurus and Formal Concept Analysis technique (FCA). We also analyzed the FCA’s lattice structure and proposed a measure of similarity based on Tversky’s model, which allowed us to identify closely related concepts in different source ontologies. In this paper, we apply the alignment method to ontologies developed for a completely different domain, and enhance the solution by providing a navigational aid for the lattice. It is well known that one of the main drawbacks of the application of FCA is that the resulting lattice soon becomes cluttered when the number of objects and attributes increases. The proposed solution is based on hyperbolic visualization and on structural elements of the lattice.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Embrapa Informática Agropecuária, Caixa Postal 6041, CEP 13083-886, Campinas, SP, Brazil

    Kleber Xavier Sampaio de Souza & Silvio Roberto de Medeiros Evangelista

  2. School of Information Technologies, The University of Sydney, Madsen Building F09, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia

    Kleber Xavier Sampaio de Souza & Joseph Davis

Authors
  1. Kleber Xavier Sampaio de Souza
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  2. Joseph Davis
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  3. Silvio Roberto de Medeiros Evangelista
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. EPFL-IC-IIF-LBD, Station 14 - INJ 236, 1015, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Stefano Spaccapietra

  2. Informatica e Automazione, Università Roma Tre, Via Vasca Navale 79, 00146, Roma, Italy

    Paolo Atzeni

  3. Computer Science Department, UCLA, 90095, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Wesley W. Chu

  4. Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Universitá di Roma “La Sapienza”, Via Ariosto 25, 00185, Roma, Italy

    Tiziana Catarci

  5. School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Katia P. Sycara

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de Souza, K.X.S., Davis, J., de Medeiros Evangelista, S.R. (2006). Aligning Ontologies, Evaluating Concept Similarities and Visualizing Results. In: Spaccapietra, S., Atzeni, P., Chu, W.W., Catarci, T., Sycara, K.P. (eds) Journal on Data Semantics V. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3870. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11617808_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11617808_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-31426-4

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