Define the concept of "ontology alignment"

[matentzn]

Preferred name: ontology alignment

Alternative names: ontology bridge

Definition:

A category of mapping that defines, for two ontologies O1 and O2, a set of logical axioms Alignment(O1, O2) that, in combination with O1 and O2, lead to an integrated ontology.

[matentzn]

Maybe someone knows a standard definition we can adopt?

[gouttegd]

No and I don’t necessarily have a better definition to propose, but a problem I have with this one is that it conflates the mappings with one of their possible uses.

For example, the cross-species mappings between Uberon/CL and the taxon-specific ontologies may be used to create an integrated ontology (and that’s certainly their primary purpose, the main reason we create/maintain those mappings), but once they exist they may completely be used by anyone for completely different purposes.

[matentzn]

From @jonquet

In the domain the reference definition is

[Euzenat & Shvaiko, Ontology Matching, Springer, 2nd ed., 2013]

“Ontology alignment is the process of determining correspondences between concepts in different ontologies.”

More precisely, the book defines it as:

“Given two ontologies O₁ and O₂, an alignment A between O₁ and O₂ is a set of correspondences between entities of O₁ and O₂. Each correspondence expresses a relation holding between entities (such as equivalence, subsumption, or disjointness) possibly associated with a confidence measure.”

[matentzn]

I agree that we should probably use Euzenat & Shvaiko as the authority on defining "Ontology Alignment"

[maweber-bia]

I jump in to propose a clarification between "alignment", "matching" and "mapping"

We could define ontology mapping (or ontology matching) as the task (or process) of establishing mappings (=correspondences or alignments) between a source object and a target object.