Comparison between ontology distances.pdf

Comparison between ontology distances (preliminary results) Jérôme David and Jérôme Euzenat INRIA Grenoble Rhône-Alpes LIG Grenoble, France Jerome.{David|Euzenat}@inrialpes.fr Abstract. There are many reasons for measuring a distance between ontologies. In particular, it is useful to know quickly if two ontologies are close or remote before deciding to match them. To that extent, a distance between ontologies must be quickly computable. We present constraints applying to such measures and several possible ontology distances. Then we evaluate experimentally some of them in order to assess their accuracy and speed. 1 Motivations The semantic web aims at exploiting formal knowledge at the world scale. It is, in par- ticular, based on ontologies: a structure defining concepts used to represent knowledge and their relationships. These concepts are used for specifying semantic web services, annotating web resources (pictures, web pages, music) or for describing data flows. It is however likely that different information sources will use different ontologies. It is thus necessary to find correspondences between ontologies in order to communicate from one ontology to another. Finding correspondences is called matching ontologies and the resulting set of correspondences is called an alignment [Euzenat and Shvaiko, ] 2007 . Together with matching ontologies, there are many occasions where it is useful to know if two ontologies are close to each others or not, or what is the closest ontology to another one. In particular, – when one wants to find the community of people with whom she will be more likely to communicate easily, finding if they use similar ontologies ca