Strategies and Methods for Ontology Alignment

The concept of ontologies has been around for millennia and spans many domains and disciplines. Ontologies are a powerful concept when applied to intelligent computing. Ontologies are the backbone of intelligent computing on the World Wide Web and crucial in many decision-support situations. Many sophisticated tools have been developed to support working with ontologies, including prominently exploiting the vast array of existing ontologies. Systems have been developed to automatically generate, match, and integrate ontologies in a process called ontology alignment. This chapter extends the current literature by presenting a system called ALIGN, which demonstrates how to use freely available tools to develop and facilitate ontology alignment. The first two ontologies are built with the ontology editor Protégé and represented in OWL. ALIGN then accesses these ontologies via Java's JENA framework and SPARQL queries. The efficacy of the ALIGN prototype is demonstrated on a drug-drug interaction problem. The prototype could readily be applied to other domains or be incorporated into decision-support tools.