[Download]
[Install & use]
[Tutorial]
[Documentation]
[Release notes]
[SVN access]
[Server]
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:
- Storing, finding, and sharing alignments;
- Piping alignment algorithms (improving an existing alignment);
- Manipulating (thresholding and hardening);
- Generating processing output (transformations, axioms, rules);
- Comparing alignments.
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 not fully complete.
Plug-ins
- NeOn Alignment plug-in
- Alignment API and server plug-in for the NeOn toolkit.
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- Starting quickly with OWL-API (Outdated notes about the OWL API and its integration in the Alignment API).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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