OVERVIEW OF ONTOLOGY ALIGNMENT TECHNIQUES AND METHODS

Ontologies enable knowledge representation in a formal and in a machine-readable way. Numerous ontologies have been developed in recent years. Linking these ontologies semantically is an essential requirement in order to establish interoperability between agents, services or users working with them. Consequently, ontology alignment becomes a central issue, when building a world-wide Semantic Web. It would be too demanding to do it manually because of certain complexity, size and number of ontologies. Automatic or at least semiautomatic techniques have to be developed to reduce the burden of manual creation and maintenance of alignments. The main goal of this paper is to give an overview of ontology alignment techniques and to show how these techniques can be combined in the ontology alignment process. Different approaches in the ontology alignment techniques classification are represented. Furthermore, basic phases of ontology alignment process are described. An overview of ontology alignment and matching systems together with the alignment techniques implementation are represented. The analysis of existing techniques and their implementations lead to a conclusion that there is still room for improvement of the alignment process.