LCS: A Linguistic Combination System for Ontology Matching

Ontology matching is an essential operation in many application domains, such as the Semantic Web, ontology merging or integration. So far, quite a few ontology matching approaches or matchers have been proposed. It has been observed that combining the results of multiple matchers is a promising technique to get better results than just using one matcher at a time. Many aggregation operators, such as Max, Min, Average and Weighted, have been developed. The limitations of these operators are studied. To overcome the limitations and provide a semantic interpretation for each aggregation operator, in this paper, we propose a linguistic combination system (LCS), where a linguistic aggregation operator (LAO), based on the ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operator, is used for the aggregation. A weight here is not associated with a specific matcher but a particular ordered position. A large number of LAOs can be developed for different uses, and the existing aggregation operators Max, Min and Average are the special cases in LAOs. For each LAO, there is a corresponding semantic interpretation. The experiments show the strength of our system.