A comparison of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms for the ontology meta-matching problem

In recent years, several ontology-based systems have been developed for data integration purposes. The principal task of these systems is to accomplish an ontology alignment process capable of matching two ontologies used for modeling heterogeneous data sources. Unfortunately, in order to perform an efficient ontology alignment, it is necessary to address a nested issue known as ontology meta-matching problem consisting in appropriately setting some regulating parameters. Over years, evolutionary algorithms are appeared to be the most suitable methodology to address this problem. However, almost all of existing approaches work with a single function to be optimized even though a possible solution for the ontology meta-matching problem can be viewed as a compromise among different objectives. Therefore, approaches based on multi-objective optimization are emerging as techniques more efficient than conventional evolutionary algorithms in solving the meta-matching problem. The aim of this paper is to perform a systematic comparison among well-known multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) in order to study their effects in solving the meta-matching problem. As shown through computational experiments, among the compared multi-objective EAs, OMOPSO statistically provides the best performance in terms of the well-known measures such as hypervolume, Δ index and coverage of two sets. © 2014 IEEE.