First Experiments in Cultural Alignment Repair (Extended Version)

Alignments between ontologies may be established through agents holding such ontologies attempting at communicating and taking appropriate action when communication fails. This approach, that we call cultural repair, has the advantage of not assuming that everything should be set correctly before trying to communicate and of being able to overcome failures. We test here the adaptation of this approach to alignment repair, i.e., the improvement of incorrect alignments. For that purpose, we perform a series of experiments in which agents react to mistakes in alignments. The agents only know about their ontologies and alignments with others and they act in a fully decentralised way. We show that cultural repair is able to converge towards successful communication through improving the objective correctness of alignments. The obtained results are on par with a baseline of a priori alignment repair algorithms.