(2017-06-06)

Using ontologies is the standard way to achieve interoperability of heterogeneous systems within the Semantic web. However, as the ontologies underlying two systems are not necessarily compatible, they may in turn need to be aligned. Similarity-based approaches to alignment seems to be both powerful and flexible enough to match the expressive power of languages like OWL. We present an alignment tool that follows the similarity-based paradigm, called OLA. OLA relies on a universal measure for comparing the entities of two ontologies that combines in a homogeneous way the entire amount of knowledge used in entity descriptions. The measure is computed by an iterative fixed-point-bound process producing subsequent approximations of the target solution. The alignments produce by OLA on the contest ontology pairs and the way they relate to the expected alignments is discussed and some preliminary conclusions about the relevance of the similarity-based approach as well as about the experimental settings of the contest are drawn.