Light-weight ontology alignment using best-match clone detection

Ontologies are a key component of the Semantic Web, providing a common basis for representing and exchanging domain meaning in web documents and resources. Ontology alignment is the problem of relating the elements of two formal ontologies for a semantic domain, in order to identify common concepts and relationships represented using different terminology or language, and thus allow meaningful communication and exchange of documents and resources represented using different ontologies for the same domain. Many algorithms have been proposed for ontology alignment, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The problem is in many ways similar to nearmiss clone detection: while much of the description of concepts in two ontologies may be similar, there can be differences in structure or vocabulary that make similarity detection challenging. Based on our previous work extending clone detection to modelling languages such as WSDL using contextualization, in this work we apply near-miss clone detection to the problem of ontology alignment, and use the new notion of “best-match” clone detection to achieve results similar to many existing ontology alignment algorithms when applied to standard benchmarks.