Towards A Realism-Based Metric for Quality Assurance in Ontology Matching

• Authors: Werner Ceusters
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference (FOIS 2006)
• Year: 2006

Ontology matching is commonly defined as a matter of dealing with semantic correspondences between terms in ontologies and thus refers to more specific activities such as mapping or aligning, possibly with ontology merging in mind. However, it has been pointed out that there still prevails no common understanding of what such 'semantic correspondences' are supposed to be, and that in consequence “human experts do not agree on how ontologies should be merged, and we do not yet have a good enough metric for comparing ontologies.” In what follows we define such a metric, which is designed to allow assessment of the degree to which the integration of two ontologies yields improvements over either of the input ontologies. We start out from the thesis that if two or more ontologies are to be considered for matching, then, however much they may reflect distinct views of reality on the part of their authors, the portions of reality to which they refer must be such as to overlap. Our approach takes account of the fact that both authors and users of ontologies may make mistakes (the former in their interpretation of reality and in the formulation of their views, the latter in misinterpreting the former's intentions).To do justice to such factors, we need to draw a distinction between three levels of: (1) reality; (2) cognitive representations; and (3) publicly accessible concretizations of these representations. We can then define 'semantic correspondence' not, as is usual, in terms of (horizontal) relations of 'association' or 'synonymy' between the terms within the ontologies to be matched, but rather in terms of the (vertical) relation of reference: terms correspond semantically if they refer to the same entities in reality. One conclusion of our argument is that, when ontology matching has been used as the first step towards ontology merging, then the merged ontology can contain inconsistencies only if there are already inconsistencies in at least one of the source ontologies.