The OAEI food task: An analysis of a thesaurus alignment task

This paper describes the “food task” of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) 2006 and 2007. The OAEI** is a comparative evaluation effort to measure the quality of automatic ontology-alignment systems. The food task focuses on the alignment of thesauri in the agricultural domain. It aims at providing a realistic task for ontology-alignment systems by which the relative performance of the alignment systems can be evaluated. Research groups from around the world signed up their ontology-alignment system for the task. Each system automatically constructed an alignment. The alignments were then compared by means of statistical performance measures to get clues about which techniques work best for automatic ontology alignment. To complement this quantitative evaluation we performed an in-depth qualitative analysis of the results to draw conclusions about the strengths and weaknesses of the various alignment approaches and the specific challenges of thesaurus alignment and its evaluation.