Instance-Based Ontology Matching by Instance Enrichment

The ontology matching (OM) problem is an important barrier to achieve true Semantic Interoperability. Instance-based ontology matching (IBOM) uses the extension of concepts, the instances directly associated with a concept, to determine whether a pair of concepts is related or not. While IBOM has many strengths it requires instances that are associated with concepts of both ontologies, (i.e) dually annotated instances. In practice, however, instances are often associated with concepts of a single ontology only, rendering IBOM rarely applicable. In this paper we discuss a method that enables IBOM to be used on two disjoint datasets, thus making it far more generically applicable. This is achieved by enriching instances of each dataset with the conceptual annotations of the most similar instances from the other dataset, creating artificially dually annotated instances. We call this technique instance-based ontology matching by instance enrichment (IBOMbIE). We have applied the IBOMbIE algorithm in a real-life use-case where large datasets are used to match the ontologies of European libraries. Existing gold standards and dually annotated instances are used to test the impact and significance of several design choices of the IBOMbIE algorithm. Finally, we compare the IBOMbIE algorithm to other ontology matching algorithms.