Due to the recent explosion of the amount of on-line accessible biomedical data and tools, finding and retrieving the relevant information is not an easy task. The vision of a Semantic Web for life sciences alleviates these difficulties. A key technology for the Semantic Web is ontologies. In recent years many biomedical ontologies have been developed and many of these ontologies contain overlapping information. To be able to use multiple ontologies they have to be aligned or merged. In this paper we propose a framework for aligning and merging ontologies. Further, we developed a system for aligning and merging biomedical ontologies (SAMBO) based on this framework. The framework is also a first step towards a general framework that can be used for comparative evaluations of alignment strategies and their combinations. In this paper we evaluated different strategies and their combinations in terms of quality and processing time and compared SAMBO with two other systems.

In recent years many biomedical ontologies have been developed and many of these ontologies contain overlapping information. To be able to use multiple ontologies they have to be aligned. In this paper we propose strategies for aligning ontologies based on life science literature. We propose a basic algorithm as well as extensions that take the structure of the ontologies into account. We evaluate the strategies and compare them with strategies implemented in the alignment system SAMBO. We also evaluate the combination of the proposed strategies and the SAMBO strategies.

Ontologies are an important technology for the Semantic Web and many ontologies have already been developed. Many ontologies also contain overlapping information and to be able to use them together effectively, we need to align them. Some of the current alignment techniques use information about the structure of the ontologies, but they have not produced good results in evaluations. We propose an approach where, in contrast to the other approaches, structural information is used as a filtering method in the alignment process. We evaluate the approach in terms of quality and performance.

Ontologies are an important technology for the Semantic Web. In different areas ontologies have already been developed and many of these ontologies contain overlapping information. Often we would therefore want to be able to use multiple ontologies. To obtain good results, we need to find the relationships between terms in the different ontologies, i.e. we need to align them. Currently, there exist a number of systems that support users in aligning ontologies, but not many comparative evaluations have been performed and there exists little support to perform such evaluations. However, the study of the properties, the evaluation and comparison of the alignment strategies and their combinations, would give us valuable insight in how the strategies could be used in the best way. In this paper we propose the KitAMO framework for comparative evaluation of ontology alignment strategies and their combinations and present our current implementation. We evaluate the implementation with respect to performance. We also illustrate how the system can be used to evaluate and compare alignment strategies and their combinations in terms of performance and quality of the proposed alignments. Further, we show how the results can be analyzed to obtain deeper insights into the properties of the strategies.

In different areas ontologies have been developed and many of these ontologies contain overlapping information. Often we would therefore want to be able to use multiple ontologies. To obtain good results, we need to find the relationships between terms in the different ontologies, i.e. we need to align them. Currently, there already exist a number of different alignment strategies. However, it is usually difficult for a user that needs to align two ontologies to decide which of the different available strategies are the most suitable. In this paper we propose a method that provides recommendations on alignment strategies for a given alignment problem. The method is based on the evaluation of the different available alignment strategies on several small selected pieces from the ontologies, and uses the evaluation results to provide recommendations. In the paper we give the basic steps of the method, and then illustrate and discuss the method in the setting of an alignment problem with two well-known biomedical ontologies. We also experiment with different implementations of the steps in the method.