A Framework for Aligning Ontologies

Ontologies are an important technology for the Semantic Web. In different areas ontologies have already been developed and many of these ontologies contain overlapping information. Often we would therefore want to be able to use multiple ontologies and thus the ontologies need to be aligned. Currently, there exist a number of systems that support users in aligning ontologies, but not many comparative evaluations have been performed. In this paper we present a general framework for aligning ontologies where different alignment strategies can be combined. Further, we exemplify the use of the framework by describing a system (SAMBO) that is developed according to this framework. Within this system we have implemented some already existing alignment algorithms as well as some new algorithms. We also show how the framework can be used to experiment with combinations of strategies. This is a first step towards defining a framework that can be used for comparative evaluations of alignment strategies. For our tests we used several well-known bio-ontologies.