Foundational Ontologies meet Ontology Matching: A Survey

Tracking #: 2650-3864

Authors: 
Cassia Trojahn dos Santos
Renata Vieira 1
Daniela Schmidt
Adam Pease
Giancarlo Guizzardi

Responsible editor: 
Jérôme Euzenat

Submission type: 
Survey Article
Abstract: 
Ontology matching is a research area aimed at finding ways to make different ontologies interoperable. Solutions to the problem have been proposed from different disciplines, including databases, natural language processing, and machine learning. The role of foundational ontologies for ontology matching is an important one. It is multifaceted and with room for development. This paper presents an overview of the different tasks involved in ontology matching that consider foundational ontologies. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of existing proposals and highlight the challenges to be addressed in the future.
Full PDF Version: 
Tags: 
Reviewed

Decision/Status: 
Accept

Solicited Reviews:
Click to Expand/Collapse
Review #1
By Michael.Uschold submitted on 05/Jan/2021
Suggestion:
Accept
Review Comment:

The authors have done a good job of taking my original comments into account in the revised paper.
(1) Suitability as introductory text, targeted at researchers, PhD students, or practitioners, to get started on the covered topic.
Comment: highly suitable.
(2) How comprehensive and how balanced is the presentation and coverage.
Comment: very comprehensive, reasonably balanced.
(3) Readability and clarity of the presentation.
Comment: generally good
(4) Importance of the covered material to the broader Semantic Web community.
Comment: if the problem could be cracked, it would be very important. So an update on where we are now is useful.

A few minor typos and grammaticos.
P5 L23 ‘one have’ -> ‘one has’
P6 L47-48 ‘considerable amount’ should be ‘considerable number’
P9 L40 ‘found available’ -> ‘found to be available’

Review #2
Anonymous submitted on 18/Jan/2021
Suggestion:
Minor Revision
Review Comment:

The paper has been revised carefully, and the main comments were addressed. Tables were added that summarize the kind of high-level properties, and main aspects of upper ontologies and that should be ready at hand for readers. A new part with a detailed description of the main upper ontologies was provided. I suggest to revise the paper from the linguistic point of view, also because in the newly added paragraphs there are redundancies and misspelled words. Also a professional proof reading would be necessary for the whole manuscript.

Review #3
Anonymous submitted on 03/Feb/2021
Suggestion:
Minor Revision
Review Comment:

I could say there is a big improvement in the current version compared to the first one. However, some of the comments from the first round have been ignored. Examples are:
- What criteria based on the shortlist of foundational ontologies have been selected?
- Even some information has been added (Table 1), however, missing important information, such as the current version of each ontology, the exact number of classes (concepts), properties that helps to understand the matching problem
- The keyword "term" needs to be well defined? what does it mean by a "term"? (i.e. concept, property, axiom, ...)
- Still do not like the way how the content of sections 3-6?

Comments related to the new version
- Abstract misses the description of the main role foundational ontologies play in ontology matching? Page 1, line 21 says that "The role of foundational ontologies for ontology matching is an important one"?
- Table 1 has a number of issues to be checked:
-- the number of concept for BFO is 35 not 34 (https://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/BFO)
-- the number of concepts for GFO is 45 and it has 41 properties, so why does it have 243 terms? (https://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/GFO)
-- The link for PROTON is not working, however, I found this one (http://www.ontotext.com/proton/protontop.html)
-- It would be helpful if the number of concepts/classes and the number of properties for each ontology will be explicitly mentioned. As I know, most existing matching systems distinguish between matching among concepts and matching among properties.
-- the current version of the ontology is also missing. It would be helpful especially when the paper discusses the matching among different versions of the same foundational ontologies
- I see the used Example (from conference ontology) is somehow misleading. It would be good if this example will be replaced by two foundational ontologies.
- I like the idea of adding a table to summarize the discussion of each matching use case. However, it would be good also if a deeper discussion will be added at the end of each section (Sections 3-6).
- Table 2 contains different versions of DOLCE which is not considered in Section 2
- I like the organization of Section 7 into these several dimensions, however, the discussion itself still needs more deep and technical content. It looks like if it were a general ontology matching discussion, not specific to foundational ontologies. For example, "Complexity of the task" it starts to say "most approaches still rely on manually or semi-automatically established alignments. This task is far from being trivial, even when done manually", so it is not clear why ontology matching considering foundational ontologies is a complex task. Is this due to it has been done manually? or since it is hard it is done manually. The paper should discuss challenges that make the task is hard and complex in this specific scenario (considering FOs).