The OAEI-2007 results are available here

Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative

2007 Campaign

The increasing number of methods available for schema matching/ontology integration suggests the need to establish a consensus for evaluation of these methods. Since 2004, OAEI organizes evaluation campaigns aiming at evaluating ontology matching technologies (see http://oaei.ontologymatching.org/2004/Contest/, http://oaei.ontologymatching.org/2005, and http://oaei.ontologymatching.org/2006).

The OAEI 2007 campaign is associated to the ISWC Ontology matching workshop to be help at Busan, Korea on November 11, 2007.

Problems

This year's campaign will consist of four tracks gathering six data sets and different evaluation modalities.

Comparison track: benchmark
Like in previous campaigns, a systematic benchmark series has been produced. The goal of this benchmark series is to identify the areas in which each alignment algorithm is strong and weak. The test is based on one particular ontology dedicated to the very narrow domain of bibliography and a number of alternative ontologies of the same domain for which alignments are provided.
Expressive ontologies
anatomy
The anatomy real world case is about matching the Adult Mouse Anatomy (2744 classes) and the NCI Thesaurus (3304 classes) describing the human anatomy.
Directories and thesauri
directory
The directory real world case consists of alignming web sites directory (like open directory or Yahoo's). It is more than 4 thousand elementary tests.
food
Two SKOS thesauri about food have to be aligned using relations from the SKOS Mapping vocabulary. Samples of the results are evaluated by domain experts.
environment
Three SKOS thesauri about the environment have to be aligned (A-B, B-C, C-A) using relations from the SKOS Mapping vocabulary. Samples of the results are evaluated by domain experts.
library
Two SKOS thesauri about books have to be aligned using relations from the SKOS Mapping vocabulary. Samples of the results are evaluated by domain experts.
Consensus workshop: conference
Participants will be asked to freely explore a collection of 'conference organisation' ontologies (the domain being well understandable for every researcher). This effort will materialise in (complete or sections of) submitted papers, containing e.g. interesting individual correspondences ('nuggets'), aggregated statistical observations and/or implicit design patterns. There is no a priori reference alignment. Organisers of this track offer a posteriori evaluation of results in part manually and in part by data-mining techniques. For a selected sample of correspondences, consensus will be sought at the workshop and the process of its reaching will be recorded.

We summarize below the variation between the results expected by these tests (all results are given in the Alignment format):

testlanguagerelationsconfidence
benchmarksOWL=[0 1]open
anatomyOWL=1blind
directoryOWL=1blind
food
environment
library
SKOS
+OWL
exactMatch,
narrowMatch,
broadMatch
1blind
conferenceOWL-DL=, <=1blind+consensual

Evaluation process

Each data set has a different evaluation process. They can be roughly divided into four groups:

benchmark: open
benchmark tests are provided with the expected results. Participants must return their obtained results to organisers;
anatomy, directory, food, library: blind
these are blind tests, i.e., participants do not know the results and must return their results to organisers;
conference: consensus
requires that participants send their results to organisers, the results are not pre-determined through reference alignments but computed and/or discussed as a consensus among given results.

However, the evaluation will be processed in the same three successive steps as before.

Preparatory Phase

Ontologies are described in OWL-DL and serialized in the RDF/XML format. The expected alignments are provided in the Alignment format expressed in RDF/XML.

The ontologies and alignments of the evaluation are provided in advance during the period between May 15th and June 15th. This gives potential participants the occasion to send observations, bug corrections, remarks and other test cases to the organizers. The goal of this primary period is to be sure that the delivered tests make sense to the participants. The feedback is important, so all participants should not hesitate to provide it. The tests will certainly change after this period, but only for ensuring a better participation to the tests. The final test base will be released on July 2nd.

Execution Phase

During the execution phase the participants will use their algorithms to automatically match the ontologies of both part. The participants should only use one algorithm and the same set of parameters for all tests in all tracks. Of course, it is fair to select the set of parameters that provide the best results (for the tests where results are known). Beside the parameters the input of the algorithms must be the two provided ontology to align and any general purpose resource available to everyone (that is no resourse especially designed for the test). In particular, the participants should not use the data (ontologies and results) from other test sets to help their algorithm. And cheating is not fair...

The deadline for delivering finial results is October 1st, sharp. However, it is highly advised that participants send results before (preferably by September 3rd) to the organisers so that they can check that they will be able to evaluate the results smoothly and can provide some feedback to participants.

The participants will provide their alignment for each test in the Alignment format. The results will be provided in a zip file containing one directory per test (named after its number) and each directory containing one result file in the RDF/XML Alignment format with always the same name (e.g., participant.rdf replacing participant by the name you want your system to appear in the results, limited to 6 alphanumeric characters). This should yield the following structure:

participant.zip
+- benchmarks
|  +- 101
|  |  +- participant.rdf
|  +- 103
|  |  +- participant.rdf
|  + ...
+- anatomy
|  +- 1
|  |  +- participant.rdf
|  +- 2
|  |  +- participant.rdf
|  +- ...
+- directory
|  +- 1
|  |  +- participant.rdf
|  + ...
+ ...

They will also provide for October 1st a paper to be published in the proceedings and a link to their program and parameter set.

The only interesting alignments are those involving classes and properties of the given ontologies. So the alignments should not align individuals, nor entities from the external ontologies.

Evaluation Phase

The organizers will evaluate the results of the algorithms used by the participants and provide comparisons on the basis of the provided alignments.

In order to ensure that it will be possible to process automatically the provided results, the participants are requested to provide (preliminary) results by September 4th. In the case of blind tests only the organizers will do the evaluation with regard to the withheld alignments. In the case of double blind tests, the participants will provide a version of their system and the values of the parameters if any.

An email with the location of the required zip files must be sent to the contact addresses below.

The standard evaluation measures will be precision and recall computed against the reference alignments. For the matter of aggregation of the measures we will use weighted harmonic means (weight being the size of reference alignment). Precision/recall graphs will also be computed, so it is advised that participants provide their results with a weight to each correspondence they found (participants can provide two alignment results: <name>.rdf for the selected alignment and <name>-full.rdf for the alignment with weights.

Furthermore, it is planned to introduce new measures addressing some limitations of precision and recall. These will be presented at the workshop discussion in order for the participants to provide feedback on the opportunity to use them in a further evaluation.

Schedule Overview

May 15st
tests are out
June 15t
end of commenting period
July 2nd
tests are frozen
September 3rd
participants send preliminary results (for interoperability-checking)
October 1st
participants send final results and papers
October 11th
organizers publish results for comments
November 11th
final results ready and OM-2007 workshop.

Presentation

From the results of the experiments the participants are expected to provide the organisers with a paper to be published in the proceedings of the workshop. The paper must be around 8 pages long and formatted using the LNCS Style. To ensure easy comparability among the participants it has to follow the given outline. A package with LaTeX and Word templates will be made available here. The above mentionned paper must be sent in PDF format by October 1st to Pavel Shvaiko (pavel (à) dit dot unitn dot it) with copy to Jerome . Euzenat (à) inrialpes . fr.

Participants may also submit a longer version of their paper, with a length justified by its technical content, to be published online in the CEUR-WS collection and on the OAEI web site (this last paper will be due just before the workshop).

The outline of the paper is as below:

The results from both, the participants and the organizers, will be presented at the Workshop on Ontology matching at ISWC 2007 taking place at Busan (Korea) on November, 11th 2007. We hope to see you there.

Tools and material

The material for evaluation will be available soon from this page.

Processing tools

The participants may use the Alignment API for generating and manipulating their alignments (in particular for computing evaluation of results).

SKOS conversion tools

The participants may use various options if they need to convert SKOS vocabularies into OWL.

OWL-N3 conversion tools

Vassilis Spiliopoulos pointed out to Altova transformer from OWL to N3 notation. This can be useful for some. This is a commercial tool with a 30 days free trial.

Organizers


http://oaei.ontologymatching.org/2007/

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