30 Active Ontology Alignment Tools

More Active Tools than Last Census

For the last couple of years one of the more popular articles on this blog has been my 2014 listing of 50 ontology alignment tools. When published, only 20 of those fifty were active; the rest had been abandoned. Ontology alignment, also sometimes called ontology mapping or ontology matching, is making formal correspondences between concepts in two or more knowledge graphs, or ontologies. Entity matching may also be included in the mix.

I had occasion to update this listing for some recent work. Three active tools from that last listing have now been retired, but I was also able to identify nine new ones and to update quite a few others. Here is the updated listing:

• AgreementMakerLight is an automated and efficient ontology matching system derived from AgreementMaker

• ALCOMO is a shortcut for Applying Locical Constraints on Matching Ontologies. ALCOMO is a debugging system that allows incoherent alignments to be transformed to coherent ones by removing some correspondences from the alignment, called a diagnosis. It is complete in the sense that it detects any kind of incoherence in SHIN(D) ontologies

• Alignment is a collaborative, system aided, user driven ontology/vocabulary matching application

• The Alignment API is an API and implementation for expressing and sharing ontology alignments. The correspondences between entities (e.g., classes, objects, properties) in ontologies is called an alignment. The API provides 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)

• ALIN is an ontology alignment system specializing in the interactive alignment of ontologies. Its main characteristic is the selection
  of correspondences to be shown to the expert, depending on the previous feedbacks given by the expert. This selection is based on semantic and structural characteristics

• Blooms is a tool for ontology matching. It utilizes information from Wikipedia category hierarchy and from the web to identify subclass relationship between entities. See also its Wiki page

• CODI (Combinatorial Optimization for Data Integration) leverages terminological structure for ontology matching. The current implementation produces mappings between concepts, properties, and individuals. CODI is based on the syntax and semantics of Markov logic and transforms the alignment problem to a maximum-a-posteriori optimization problem

• COMA++ is a schema and ontology matching tool with a comprehensive infrastructure. Its graphical interface supports a variety of interaction

• Falcon-AO (Finding, aligning and learning ontologies) is an automatic ontology matching tool that includes the three elementary matchers of String, V-Doc and GMO. In addition, it integrates a partitioner PBM to cope with large-scale ontologies

• hMAFRA (Harmonize Mapping Framework) is a set of tools supporting semantic mapping definition and data reconciliation between ontologies. The targeted formats are XSD, RDFS and KAON

• GOMMA is a generic infrastructure for managing and analyzing life science ontologies and their evolution. The component-based infrastructure utilizes a generic repository to uniformly and efficiently manage many versions of ontologies and different kinds of mappings. Different functional components focus on matching life science ontologies, detecting and analyzing evolutionary changes and patterns in these ontologies

• HerTUDA is a simple, fast ontology matching tool, based on syntactic string comparison and filtering of irrelevant mappings. Despite its simplicity, it outperforms many state-of-the-art ontology matching tools

• Karma is an information integration tool to integrate data from databases, spreadsheets, delimited text files, XML, JSON, KML and Web APIs. Users integrate information according to an ontology of their choice using a graphical user interface that automates much of the process. Karma learns to recognize the mapping of data to ontology classes and then uses the ontology to propose a model that ties together these classes

• KitAMO is a tool for evaluating ontology alignment strategies and their combinations. It supports the study, evaluation and comparison of alignment strategies and their combinations based on their performance and the quality of their alignments on test cases. Based on the SAMBO project

• The linked open data enhancer (LODE) framework is a set of integrated tools that allow digital humanists, librarians, and information scientists to connect their data collections to the linked open data cloud. It can be applied to any domain with RDF datasets

• LogMap is highly scalable ontology matching system with ‘built-in’ reasoning and diagnosis capabilities. LogMap can deal with semantically rich ontologies containing tens (and even hundreds) of thousands of classes

• Map-On is a collaborative ontology mapping environment which supports different users –domain experts, data owners, and ontology engineers– to integrate data in a collaborative way using standard semantic technologies

• MapOnto is a research project aiming at discovering semantic mappings between different data models, e.g, database schemas, conceptual schemas, and ontologies. So far, it has developed tools for discovering semantic mappings between database schemas and ontologies as well as between different database schemas. The Protege plug-in is still available, but appears to be for older versions

• OntoM is one component of the OntoBuilder, which is a comprehensive ontology building and managing framework. OntoM provides a choice of mapping and scoring methods for matching schema

• OntoSim is a Java API allowing to compute similarities between ontologies. It relies on the Alignment API for ontology loading so it is quite independent of the ontology API used (JENA or OWL API)

• OpenII Harmony is a schema matching tool that combines multiple language-based matching algorithms and a graphical user interface

• OxO is a service for finding mappings (or cross-references) between terms from ontologies, vocabularies and coding standards. OxO imports mappings from a variety of sources including the Ontology Lookup Service and a subset of mappings provided by the UMLS

• PARIS is a system for the automatic alignment of RDF ontologies. PARIS aligns not only instances, but also relations and classes. Alignments at the instance level cross-fertilize with alignments at the schema level

• S-Match takes any two tree like structures (such as database schemas, classifications, lightweight ontologies) and returns a set of correspondences between those tree nodes which semantically correspond to one another

• ServOMap is an ontology matching tool based on Information Retrieval technique relying on the ServO system. To run it, please follow the directions described at http://oaei.ontologymatching.org/2012/seals-eval.html

• The Silk framework is a tool for discovering relationships between data items within different Linked Data sources. Data publishers can use Silk to set RDF links from their data sources to other data sources on the Web. While designed for mapping instance data, it can also be used for schema

• treemerge.io is a web based tool to: 1) import category systems (tree based taxonomies/ontologies) in the form of JSON files; 2) map them using a visual user interface; 3) export a single unified ontology

• WikiV3 is an ontology matching system that uses Wikipedia as an external knowledge base useful for concepts, entities, and properties and multi=lingual alignments

• Yam++ (not) Yet Another Matcher is a flexible and self-configuring ontology matching system for discovering semantic correspondences between entities (i.e., classes, object properties and data properties) of ontologies. This new version YAM++ 2013 has a significant improvement from the previous versions. See also the 2013 results. Code not apparently available.