Ontology Mapping Validation: Dealing with an NP-Complete Problem

The use of ontologies and ontology mappings is increasing in companies. Often the same context is modeled in different ontologies. Mapping is necessary to integrate these ontologies; however, in many cases these mappings are incorrect, i.e., they incorrectly link semantic concepts with different meanings. Tools that validate these mappings are necessary to ensure reliable communication between heterogeneous systems. This validation cannot be done in a completely automatic way, because the mappings are based on human interpretation. This work describes a semi-automatic tool that supports this activity, based on graphs that generate instances validated in a semi-automatic process that aims to ensure mapping robustness. This algorithm deals with an NP-Complete problem in order to generate all the instances. This paper presents a first prototype of the tool and the methodology used to validate the instances automatically generated by the tool.