Applying NSGA-II for solving the ontology alignment problem

Achieving semantic interoperability is an essential task for all distributed and open knowledge based systems. Currently, the best technology recognized for fulfilling this complex task is represented by ontologies. Unfortunately, in turn, the power of ontological representation is reduced by the semantic heterogeneity problem which affects two ontologies when they are characterized by terminological and conceptual discrepancies. The most solid solution to overcome this problem is to perform an ontology alignment process capable of leading two heterogeneous ontologies into a mutual agreement by detecting a set of correspondences between them. All ontology alignment processes based on evolutionary approaches developed so far perform an evaluation of the produced alignments based on multiobjectives "a priori" approaches. This paper proposes to apply NSGA II to ontology alignment problem in order to overcome the well-known drawbacks of "a priori" methods. As shown in the experimental section, the application of NSGA II allows to improving semantic interoperability by finding high quality solutions that are not detected by "a priori" approaches. © 2013 IEEE.