Applying Semantic Web Technologies to Ontology Alignment

Abstract

Ontologies are the backbone of intelligent computing on the World Wide Web but also crucial in many decision support situations. Many sophisticated tools have been developed to support working with ontologies, including prominently exploiting the vast array of existing ontologies. A system called ALIGN is developed that demonstrates how to use freely available tools to facilitate ontology alignment. First two ontologies are built with the ontology editor Protégé and represented in OWL. ALIGN then accesses these ontologies via Java’s JENA framework and SPARQL queries. The efficacy of the ALIGN prototype is demonstrated on a drug-drug interaction problem. The prototype could readily be applied to other domains or be incorporated into decision support tools.