Towards composing and benchmarking ontology alignments

Formal resources on the web will be expressed in the framework of an ontology. Integrating such resources requires finding agreement between ontologies (ontology alignment). Many methods have been put forward for aligning ontologies. They involve different techniques (linguistic, statistical, structural) and are based on various features of ontologies (names, internal structure, external structure, extension or semantics). It is necessary to allow these methods to cooperate and to be able to compare them in order to stimulate research on ontology alignment. We propose here a first attempt toward this based on a format for expressing the alignment independently of the methods used for building them and a first benchmarking framework for alignment methods. This sketch of foregoing work in the framework of the European FP6 ’Knowledge web’ is intended to be discussed and improved.