S-Match: An open source framework for matching lightweight ontologies

Achieving automatic interoperability among systems with diverse data structures and languages expressing different viewpoints is a goal that has been difficult to accomplish. This paper describes S-Match, an open source semantic matching framework that tackles the semantic interoperability problem by transforming several data structures such as business catalogs, web directories, conceptual models and web services descriptions into lightweight ontologies and establishing semantic correspondences between them. The framework is the first open source semantic matching project that includes three different algorithms tailored for specific domains and provides an extensible API for developing new algorithms, including possibility to plug-in specific background knowledge according to the characteristics of each application domain.