A Compact Co-Evolutionary Algorithm for sensor ontology meta-matching

With the proliferation of sensors, semantic web technologies are becoming closely related to sensor network. The linking of elements from semantic web technologies with sensor networks is called semantic sensor web whose main feature is the use of sensor ontologies. However, due to the subjectivity of different sensor ontology designer, different sensor ontologies may define the same entities with different names or in different ways, raising so-called sensor ontology heterogeneity problem. There are many application scenarios where solving the problem of semantic heterogeneity may have a big impact, and it is urgent to provide techniques to enable the processing, interpretation and sharing of data from sensor web whose information is organized into different ontological schemes. Although sensor ontology heterogeneity problem can be effectively solved by Evolutionary Algorithm (EA)-based ontology meta-matching technologies, the drawbacks of traditional EA, such as premature convergence and long runtime, seriously hamper them from being applied in the practical dynamic applications. To solve this problem, we propose a novel Compact Co-Evolutionary Algorithm (CCEA) to improve the ontology alignment’s quality and reduce the runtime consumption. In particular, CCEA works with one better probability vector (PV) \(PV_{better}\) and one worse PV \(PV_{worse}\), where \(PV_{better}\) mainly focuses on the exploitation which dedicates to increase the speed of the convergence and \(PV_{worse}\) pays more attention to the exploration which aims at preventing the premature convergence. In the experiment, we use Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) test cases and two pairs of real sensor ontologies to test the performance of our approach. The experimental results show that CCEA-based ontology matching approach is both effective and efficient when matching ontologies with various scales and under different heterogeneous situations, and compared with the state-of-the-art sensor ontology matching systems, CCEA-based ontology matching approach can significantly improve the ontology alignment’s quality.