Context-Based Matching: Design of a Flexible Framework and Experiment

Context-based matching finds correspondences between entities from two ontologies by relating them to other resources. A general view of context-based matching is designed by analysing existing such matchers. This view is instantiated in a path-driven approach that (a) anchors the ontologies to external ontologies, (b) finds sequences of entities (path) that relate entities to match within and across these resources, and (c) uses algebras of relations for combining the relations obtained along these paths. Parameters governing such a system are identified and made explicit. They are used to conduct experiments with different parameter configurations to assess their influence. In particular, experiments confirm that restricting the set of ontologies reduces the time taken at the expense of recall and F-measure. Increasing path length within ontologies increases recall and F-measure as well. In addition, algebras of relations allow for a finer analysis, which shows that increasing path length provides more correct or non precise correspondences, but marginally increases incorrect correspondences.