Title: Evaluation of a method for partial ontology alignment in multi-agent system

Authors: Ademir Roberto Freddo, Cesar Augusto Tacla

Addresses: Graduate Program on Electrical Engineering and Industrial Informatics (CPGEI), Federal University of Technology – Parana, Av. Sete de Setembro 3165, Curitiba, Parana, Brazil. ' Graduate Program on Electrical Engineering and Industrial Informatics (CPGEI), Federal University of Technology – Parana, Av. Sete de Setembro 3165, Curitiba, Parana, Brazil

Abstract: In this paper, we present a method to partially align ontologies in dialogues of agents. The method is a hybrid approach based on terminological, structural and extensional techniques. Differently from other methods, the proposed approach tries to find similarities between two concepts examining only their properties (or roles in description logic), producing property signature vectors for each concept, examining role/property restrictions for each pair of concepts and computing the distances between different vectors in a high dimensional space. This approach allows for identifying similarity between concepts where other methods cannot find similarities, for instance, between disjoint concepts. The method has two steps, property similarity computation and concepts similarity computation, and can also be used as a pre-processing phase to semantic methods that need initial equivalence relations between concepts in order to work. We describe the method and show how it works with a case study. We perform an evaluation of our method using some real ontologies of the bibliography domain from the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI).

Keywords: ontology; mapping; partial alignment; multi-agent systems; MAS; agent-based systems; communication; bibliography.

DOI: 10.1504/IJRIS.2009.028013

International Journal of Reasoning-based Intelligent Systems, 2009 Vol.1 No.3/4, pp.132 - 146

Published online: 27 Aug 2009 *

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