Interactive Techniques to Support Ontology Matching

There are many automatic approaches for generating matches between ontologies and schemas. However, these techniques are far from perfect and when the use case requires an accurate matching, humans must be involved in the process. Yet, involving the users in creating matchings presents its own problems. Users have trouble understanding the relationships between large ontologies and schemas and their concepts, remembering what they have looked at and executed, understanding output from the automatic algorithm, remembering why they performed an operation, reversing their decisions, and gathering evidence to support their decisions. Recently, researchers have been investigating these issues and developing tools to help users overcome these difficulties. In this chapter, we present some of the latest work related to human-guided ontology matching. Specifically, we discuss the cognitive difficulties users face with creating ontology matchings, the latest visual tools for assisting users with matching tasks, Web 2.0 approaches, common themes, challenges, and the next steps.