The Anna Karenina problem in vocabulary alignment:

“Happy alignments are all alike;

every unhappy alignment is

unhappy in its own way”

Jacco van OssenbruggenCWI & VU University Amsterdam

Panel at the Ontology Matchingworkshop, ISWC 2012

OAEI VLCR track

• 2008: 1 participant

• 2009: 2 participants

• 2010, 2011

1

OAEI Library track

• 2008: 3 participants

• 2009: 1 participant

• 2010, 2011

• 2012: It’s back!

2

OAEI Directory track

from: Results of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative 2010JérômeEuzenat, Alfio Ferrara, Christian Meilicke, Juan Pane, François Scharffe, PavelShvaiko, HeinerStuckenschmidt, OndřejŠváb-Zamazal, VojtěchSvátek and CássiaTrojahn dos Santos

3

Observations

• Current systems are complex reasoning engines that combine multiple strategies in some “smart” way

• This “smartness” has major drawbacks:

– does not scale on large vocabularies

– hard to predict if it will work for your data

– hard to explain results afterwards: what went wrong, why & how to fix it

4

Bad news, good news

• Bad news:– alignments fail for different reasons every time

– solving this is an AI-complete problem

– requires knowledge that is in the heads of the domain experts, not in the data

• Good news:– with experts on board, it is not that difficult

– we can even do large datasets interactively

– users are willing to spend time to get it right

5

Evaluation

• Current evaluation protocol

– is not suited for evaluating interactive features

– has abstracted away all human parties involved

• ontology publishers

• application developers

• application users

– ignores that ontology publishers are often willing to spend serious time & effort on alignment process

http://semanticweb.cs.vu.nl/lod/tpdl2011/ 6

Example: AAT to WordNet

• aat:restoreraltLabels: restaurateur (fr), Restaurator (de) , hersteller (nl), ...scopeNote: Those engaged in making changes to an object or structure so

that it will closely approximate its state at a specific time in its history. (...)When changes made are to prevent further deterioration, see "preservationists." More generally, for those who undertake treatment, preventive care, and research directed toward long-term safekeeping of cultural and natural heritage, see "conservators."

• wn:restorersynonyms: refinisher, renovator, restorer, preserver gloss: a skilled worker who is employed to restore or refinish buildings or

antique furniture.

http://semanticweb.cs.vu.nl/lod/tpdl2011/ 7