[Download]
[Install & use]
[Tutorial]
[Documentation]
[Release notes]
[SVN access]
[Server]
New Alignment API 4.1. Get it!
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).
If you use this software and want to give it credit, please
cite:
Jérôme Euzenat,
An API for ontology alignment,
in: Proc. 3rd conference on international semantic web conference (ISWC), Hiroshima (JP), Lecture notes in computer science 3298:698-712, 2004
Main resources
- Download
page and Release notes
- 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.
Technical documentations
- Web service interface for the Alignment server
- REST and SOAP specification of the web service interface
- Wrapping ontology APIs
- The package contains an ontology API wrapper called ontowrap
allowing for using the Alignment API with various ontology APIs
(JENA, OWL API 1.0, 3.0, soon SKOS).
- Alignment format and
the Expressive and Declarative Ontology Alignment Language (EDOAL)
- How to express alignments that the API can input or output.
- Wordnet extension
- How to use wordnet within the API
- Registered annotations
- List of extension labels that are declared (and should not be
used by others)
- Eval
- Using the API for evaluating alignments.
Additional resources
- Bug and feature trackers
- Notify your bugs and request features here
- SVN access
- You can browse and you can join.
- Included libraries and dependencies
- Wonderful components that the Alignement API and server use.
- License
- Basically, open source (LGPL).
- Credits
- When it is due.
- Systems using the API
- Because we are proud to be used.
Plug-ins
- NeOn Alignment plug-in
- Alignment API and server plug-in for the NeOn toolkit.
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
$Id: index.html 1533 2010-10-13 12:55:52Z euzenat $