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Alignment API and Alignment Server

The Alignment API is an API and implementation for expressing and sharing ontology alignments.

Using ontologies is the priviledged way to achieve interoperability among heterogeneous systems within the Semantic web. However, as the ontologies underlying two systems are not necessarily compatible, they may in turn need to be reconcilied. Ontology reconciliation requires most of the time to find the correspondences between entities (e.g., classes, objects, properties) occuring in the ontologies. We call a set of such correspondences an alignment. We have designed a format for expressing alignments in a uniform way. The goal of this format is to be able to share on the web the available alignments. The format is expressed in RDF, so it is freely extensible.

The Alignment API itself is a Java description of tools for accessing the common format. It defines four main interfaces (Alignment, Cell, Relation and Evaluator) and proposes the following services:

Here is the new Alignment API and implementation homepage. It is hosted by gforge.inria.fr which helps the developement process (by integrating theses pages within the SVN repository for instance).

Main resources

Download page
Official releases.
Install & use
Quick start with the API.
Alignment Server
Installing a server that will generate and store alignments
Tutorial
Walk through the Alignment API features
Documentation
Supposed to be a reference manual, but outdated. It could be useful anyway.

Additional resources

Release notes
SVN access
Included libraries and dependencies
License
Credits

Technical information

Wordnet extension
How to use wordnet within the API
OWL API extension
Starting quickly with OWL-API (Outdated notes about the OWL API and its integration in the Alignment API).
Alignment format
Presentation of the Alignment format in RDF/XML.
Registered annotations
List of extension labels that are declared (and should not be used by others)
Eval
Using the API for evaluating alignments.

External resources

OAEI
The Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative: Benchmarks for evaluating ontology matchers and benchmarking campaigns (since 2004).
ontologymatching.org
The central resource for ontology matching and alignment information.


http://alignapi.gforge.inria.fr

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