"Enhancing the semantic interoperability: Applicability and utility of the ontology alignment"

Abstract
In this thesis, we present approaches for adapting an alignment process to the characteristics of the aligned ontologies, whether in respect of the quantitative characteristics such as their volume or the particular characteristics related for example to the way in which the labels of the concepts are built.

Concerning the quantitative characteristics, we propose two ontology partitioning methods that make the alignment of very large ontologies possible. Both methods generate in the input of the alignment process, subsets of reasonable size of the two ontologies to be aligned by taking into account, as soon as possible, the alignment objective in the partitioning process.

Concerning the particular characteristics of the aligned ontologies, we present the TaxoMap Framework environment that allows the specification of refinement treatments from predefined primitives. We propose a pattern language MPL (the Mapping Pattern Language) that we use to specify the refinement treatments.

In addition to the adaptation approaches to the characteristics of the aligned ontologies, we present approaches for re-using the alignment results for the ontological engineering. We focus specifically on the use of the alignment for the ontology enrichment. We study the contribution of the alignment techniques for the enrichment and the impact of the characteristics of the external resource used as a source of enrichment.

Finally, we present how the TaxoMap Framework environment was implemented and the performed experiments: tests on the TaxoMap alignment module, on the mappings refinement approach, on the partitioning methods of very large ontologies and on the ontology enrichment approach.