New Alignment API 4.1. Get it!
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 five main interfaces (OntologyNetworks, Alignment, Cell, Relation and Evaluator) and proposes the following services:
Here is the 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 David, Jérôme Euzenat, François Scharffe, Cássia Trojahn dos
Santos, The Alignment API 4.0, Semantic web journal 2(1):3-10, 2011
Please note: The Alignment API is... an API (this may be unfortunate, but it has been named appropriately). Hence, it is not a matcher. A few examples of trivial matchers are provided with the Alignment API which will indeed match ontologies. Taking such examples, which can be programmed in a couple of hours, as real matchers and comparing this with other matchers is meaningless (only when these matchers are worse than that, this is a meaningful result). Moreover, mentionning that these systems have been compared with "The Alignment API" without qualification is not appropriate. So please, compare your systems with serious competitors (hint: those which publish papers telling that their systems are good matchers; you cannot find such a paper about the Alignment API or one of its sample matcher).