Jérôme Euzenat, Adrian Mocan, François Scharffe, Ontology alignments: an ontology management perspective, in: Martin Hepp, Pieter De Leenheer, Aldo De Moor, York Sure (eds), Ontology management: semantic web, semantic web services, and business applications, Springer, New-York (NY US), 2008, pp177-206
Relating ontologies is very important for many ontology-based applications and more important in open environments like the semantic web. The relations between ontology entities can be obtained by ontology matching and represented as alignments. Hence, alignments must be taken into account in ontology management. This chapter establishes the requirements for alignment management. After a brief introduction to matching and alignments, we justify the consideration of alignments as independent entities and provide the life cycle of alignments. We describe the important functions of editing, managing and exploiting alignments and illustrate them with existing components.
ontology matching, ontology alignment, alignment management, alignment server, ontology mediation, mapping