Optimizing Hydrography Ontology Alignment Through Compact Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm

With the explosive growth in generating data in the hydrographical domain, many hydrography ontologies have been developed and maintained to describe hydrographical features and the relationships between them. However, the existing hydrography ontologies are developed with varying project perspectives and objectives, which inevitably results in the differences in terms of knowledge representation. Determining various relationships between two entities in different ontologies offers the opportunity to link hydrographical data for multiple purposes, though the research on this topic is in its infancy. Different from the traditional ontology alignment whose cardinality is 1:1, i.e. one source ontology entity is mapping with one target ontology entity and vice versa, and the relationship is the equivalence, matching hydrography ontologies is a more complex task, whose cardinality could be 1:1, 1:n or m:n and the relationships could be equivalence or subsumption. To efficiently optimize the ontology alignment, in this paper, a discrete optimal model is first constructed for the ontology matching problem, and then a Compact Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm (CPSO) based matching technique is proposed to efficiently solve it. CPSO utilizes the compact real-value encoding and decoding mechanism and the objective-decomposing strategy to approximate the PSO’s evolving process, which can dramatically reduce PSO’s memory consumption and runtime while at the same time ensure the solution’s quality. The experiment exploits the Hydrography dataset in Complex track provided by the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) to test our proposal’s performance. The experimental results show that CPSO-based approach can effectively reduce PSO’s runtime and memory consumption, and determine high-quality hydrography ontology alignments.