Knowledge Augmentation for Aligning Ontologies: An Evaluation in the Biomedical Domain

The objective of this study is to evaluate the contribution to semantic integration of the semantic relations extracted from concept names, representing augmented knowledge. Three augmentation methods – based on linguistic phenomena – are investigated (reification, nominal modification, and prepositional attachment). The number of concepts aligned in two ontologies of anatomy before and after augmentation serves as the evaluation criterion. Among the 2353 concepts exhibiting lexical resemblance across systems, the number of concepts supported by structural evidence (i.e., shared hierarchical relations) increased from 71% before augmentation to 87% after augmentation. The relative contribution of each augmentation method to the alignment is presented. The limitations of this study and the generalization of augmentation methods are discussed.