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The AlignmentOntology

The AlignmentOntology aims for a formalisation of the concept of an alignment and the relations it is based on. It is defined by an RDFSchema file, available in the repository. A corresponding Protégé project is also available. Be aware that this ontology is under development and may be subject to changes.

News

• [29.06.06] The AlignmentOntology has been created by Benjamin Horak and Björn Endres. The draft is now subject to discussion.

Feature/Change Requests

not yet

Integration/Alignment with other alignment ontologies

Integration pending.

Ontology Description

The AlignmentOntology basically defines relations between ontology entities, e.g. classes, properties, instances. The semantic of a basic, untyped relation is a connection of any kind, a cooccurrence. There are also further specifications of a realtion:

• Subsumption defines a relation like subclass_of or subproperty_of
• Superordination is the opposite of Subsumption
• Equivalence defines the two entities as semantically equivalent. In particular, this is the case if it is a supsumtion AND a superordination at the same time.
• Classification defines a type_of relationship, e.g. that an instance belongs to a class.
• Distinction states, that neither of the above holds for the relation

Each relation defines

• the two entities to relate
• a confidence value which expresses the confidence that the producer has of the correctness of the relation
• an arbitrary number of attachments, that supply additional information but are formally not important.

Finally, an Alignment is defined as a set of such Relations. Since the consistency of an alignment is controversial, this is not taken care of here. Further specialisations of Alignment will adress such issues.