Ontology Alignment

Ontology alignment techniques are particularly important because the manual creation of correspondences between concepts is not feasible, as it is too time consuming except for very small ontologies. In fact, both alignment and fusion methods allow interoperability between different ontologies. 

However, alignment is much less complex than merging due to the fact that creating and maintaining links between concepts is easier and less expensive than producing a completely new ontology that is consistent with the original ones. Although fully automatic ontology alignment is emerging as the ideal solution for semantic interoperability, the current results provided by automatic methods are still not of sufficient quality. The challenges faced by fully automatic methods are multiple, including differences in vocabulary (e.g. due to synonymy and homonymy), differences in modeling (e.g. due to different models or attribute formats) and different views on modeled reality.