Saturday, October 13, 2012: 6:00 PM
Hall 4E/F (WSCC)
The development and adoption of Semantic Web technologies has led to the generation of a large number of ontologies. An ontology is a representation of a domain of discourse by means of a set of concepts and the relationships amongst them. Exchanging and integrating information represented in these ontologies requires an automatic process to match or align such ontologies effortlessly. For example, in Cyber-ShARE at UTEP, ontologies are used to describe data represented and processes from researchers in Geological and Environmental Sciences that may be integrated using the location where the data was collected. The goal of this project is to compare the different techniques and tools available today for ontology mapping in order to find the more appropriate one for the ontologies developed at Cyber-ShARE. During the first phase of this project, it was found that there is no ready-to use, easy to install software that can match any type of ontology. Current tools were created for a specific purpose, e.g. medical ontologies with specific matching methods based on medical nomenclature. The tools being surveyed will be tested and rated on their performance in aligning a set of simple ontologies developed in-house for this purpose as well as the benchmark provided by the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (oaei.ontologymatching.org). The ontology mapping tools and techniques recommended as a result of this project will be used in the I3 Expertise System which aims to collect, expose and disseminate UTEP’s faculty research areas of expertise.