On Fixing Semantic Alignment Evaluation Measures

The evaluation of ontology matching algorithms mainly consists of comparing a produced alignment with a reference one. Usually, this evaluation relies on the classical precision and recall measures. This evaluation model is not satisfactory since it does not take into account neither the closeness of correspondances, nor the semantics of alignments. A first solution consists of generalizing the precision and recall measures in order to solve the problem of rigidity of classical model. Another solution aims at taking advantage of the semantic of alignments in the evaluation. In this paper, we show and analyze the limits of these evaluation models. Given that measures values depend on the syntactic form of the alignment, we first propose an normalization of alignment. Then, we propose two new sets of evaluation measures. The first one is a semantic extension of relaxed precision and recall. The second one consists of bounding the alignment space to make ideal semantic precision and recall applicable.