A Unified Approach for Aligning Taxonomies and Debugging Taxonomies and Their Alignments

With the increased use of ontologies in semantically-enabled applications, the issues of debugging and aligning ontologies have become increasingly important. The quality of the results of such applications is directly dependent on the quality of the ontologies and mappings between the ontologies they employ. A key step towards achieving high quality ontologies and mappings is discovering and resolving modeling defects, e.g., wrong or missing relations and mappings. In this paper we present a unified framework for aligning taxonomies, the most used kind of ontologies, and debugging taxonomies and their alignments, where ontology alignment is treated as a special kind of debugging. Our framework supports the detection and repairing of missing and wrong is-a structure in taxonomies, as well as the detection and repairing of missing (alignment) and wrong mappings between ontologies. Further, we implemented a system based on this framework and demonstrate its benefits through experiments with ontologies from the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative.