Schema/ontology matching is a critical problem in many application domains, such as, semantic web, schema/ontology integration, data warehouses, e-commerce, catalog matching, etc. Many diverse solutions to the matching problem have been proposed so far. In this paper we present a taxonomy of schema-based matching techniques that builds on the previous work on classifying schema matching approaches. Some innovations are in introducing new criteria which distinguish between matching techniques relying on diverse semantic clues. In particular, we distinguish between heuristic and formal techniques at schemalevel; and implicit and explicit techniques at element- and structure-level. Based on the classification proposed we overview some of the recent schema/ontology matching systems pointing which part of the solution space they cover.

Semantic integration is an active area of research in several disciplines, such as databases, information-integration, and ontologies. This paper provides a brief survey of the approaches to semantic integration developed by researchers in the ontology community. We focus on the approaches that differentiate the ontology research from other related areas. The goal of the paper is to provide a reader who may not be very familiar with ontology research with introduction to major themes in this research and with pointers to different research projects. We discuss techniques for finding correspondences between ontologies, declarative ways of representing these correspondences, and use of these correspondences in various semantic-integration tasks 1. ONTOLOGIES AND SEMANTIC INTE-

The Semantic Web lacks support for explaining answers from web applications. When applications return answers, many users do not know what information sources were used, when they were updated, how reliable the source was, or what information was looked up versus derived. Many users also do not know how implicit answers were derived. The Inference Web (IW) aims to take opaque query answers and make the answers more transparent by providing infrastructure for presenting and managing explanations. The explanations include information concerning where answers came from (knowledge provenance) and how they were derived (or retrieved). In this article we describe an infrastructure for IW explanations. The infrastructure includes: IWBase – an extensible web-based registry containing details about information sources, reasoners, languages, and rewrite rules; PML – the Proof Markup Language specification and API used for encoding portable proofs; IW browser – a tool supporting navigation and presentations of proofs and their explanations; and a new explanation dialogue component. Source information in the IWBase is used to convey knowledge provenance. Representation and reasoning language axioms and rewrite rules in the IWBase are used to support proofs, proof combination, and Semantic Web agent interoperability. The Inference Web is in use by four Semantic Web agents, three of them using embedded reasoning engines fully registered in the IW. Inference Web also provides explanation infrastructure for a number of DARPA and ARDA projects.

Abstract. Matching hierarchical structures, like taxonomies or web directories, is the premise for enabling interoperability among heterogenous data organizations. While the number of new matching solutions is increasing the evaluation issue is still open. This work addresses the problem of comparison for pairwise matching solutions. A methodology is proposed to overcome the issue of scalability. A large scale dataset is developed based on real world case study namely, the web directories of Google, Looksmart and Yahoo!. Finally, an empirical evaluation is performed which compares the most representative solutions for taxonomy matching. We argue that the proposed dataset can play a key role in supporting the empirical analysis for the research effort in the area of taxonomy matching. 1

We view match as an operator that takes two graph-like structures (e.g., classifications, XML schemas) and produces a mapping between the nodes of these graphs that correspond semantically to each other. Semantic matching is based on two ideas: (i) we discover mappings by computing semantic relations (e.g., equivalence, more general); (ii) we determine semantic relations by analyzing the meaning (concepts, not labels) which is codified in the elements and the structures of schemas. In this paper we present basic and optimized algorithms for semantic matching, and we discuss their implementation within the S-Match system. We evaluate S-Match against three state of the art matching systems, thereby justifying empirically the strength of our approach.

Abstract. Despite very active research on ontologies, only few useful ontologies can be found on the Web. The reasons for this are manifold, but a major obstacle is that ontology engineering environments impose high entrance barriers on users, and that the community does not have control over the ontology evolution. Wikis are a way to allow a wide range of users to contribute to Web representations without requiring more than basic Web editing skills. In the myOntology project, we propose the use of wiki technology in order to enable collaborative and community-driven ontology building by giving users with no or little expertise in ontology engineering the opportunity to contribute. In this paper, we describe the myOntology project in which the challenges of collaborative, community-driven, and wiki-based ontology engineering are investigated. Our approach combines the simplicity of wikis with intuitive visualization techniques and small yet efficient helper functionality plus consensus finding support exploiting the collective intelligence of a community.

Abstract. We view match as an operator that takes two graph-like structures (e.g., XML schemas) and produces a mapping between the nodes of these graphs that correspond semantically to each other. Semantic schema matching is based on the two ideas: (i) we discover mappings by computing semantic relations (e.g., equivalence, more general); (ii) we determine semantic relations by analyzing the meaning (concepts, not labels) which is codified in the elements and the structures of schemas. In this paper we present basic and optimized algorithms for semantic schema matching, and we discuss their implementation within the S-Match system. We also validate the approach and evaluate S-Match against three state of the art matching systems. The results look promising, in particular for what concerns quality and performance. 1

Abstract. This paper discusses problems of creating and using ontology library services in production use. One approach to a solution is presented with an online implementation—the Finnish Ontology Library Service ONKI — that is in pilot use on a national level in Finland. ONKI contributes to previous research on ontology libraries in many ways: First, mashup and web service support with various tools is provided for cost-efficient utilization of ontologies in indexing and search applications. Second, services covering the different phases of the ontology life cycle are provided. Third, the services are provided and used in real world applications on a national scale. Fourth, the ontology framework is being developed by a collaborative effort by organizations representing different application domains, such as health, culture, and business. 1

Abstract. Semantic matching determines the mappings between the nodes of two graphs (e.g., ontologies) by computing logical relations (e.g., subsumption) holding among the nodes that correspond semantically to each other. We present an approach to deal with the lack of background knowledge in matching tasks by using semantic matching iteratively. Unlike previous approaches, where the missing axioms are manually declared before the matching starts, we propose a fully automated solution. The benefits of our approach are: (i) saving some of the pre-match efforts, (ii) improving the quality of match via iterations, and (iii) enabling the future reuse of the newly discovered knowledge. We evaluate the implemented system on large real-world test cases, thus, proving empirically the benefits of our approach. 1

Abstract. With currently available tools and languages, translating between an existing XML format and RDF is a tedious and error-prone task. The importance of this problem is acknowledged by the W3C GRDDL working group who faces the issue of extracting RDF data out of existing HTML or XML files, as well as by the Web service community around SAWSDL, who need to perform lowering and lifting between RDF data from a semantic client and XML messages for a Web service. However, at the moment, both these groups rely solely on XSLT transformations between RDF/XML and the respective other XML format at hand. In this paper, we propose a more natural approach for such transformations based on merging XQuery and SPARQL into the novel language XSPARQL. We demonstrate that XSPARQL provides concise and intuitive solutions for mapping between XML and RDF in either direction, addressing both the use cases of GRDDL and SAWSDL. We also provide and describe an initial implementation of an XSPARQL engine, available for user evaluation. 1