Towards Understanding the Needs of Cognitive Support for Ontology Mapping

Researchers have developed a large number of ontology-mapping algorithms in recent years. However, ontology mapping is hardly a fully automated task and users must verify and fine-tune the mappings resulting from automated algorithms. Both academic and industry researchers have focused on the algorithms themselves and largely ignored the issue of cognitive support for users in the task of analyzing mappings proposed by the algorithms and creating new mappings. The lack of comprehensive user-oriented tools for ontology mapping (rather than just algorithms) hinders the adoption of the technologies developed by academic researchers. In this paper, we analyze requirements for cognitive support in the ontology-mapping task. Recognizing that many researchers must focus on improving the algorithm performance itself (or only on providing better visualization), we have developed a plugin framework that enables developers to assemble a comprehensive ontology-mapping tool by plugging in various components. We provide a reference implementation of the complete framework. Thus, developers can plug in only the components they are interested in. For example, algorithm developers can plug in their algorithm and use the visualization components that we provide and the user-interface researchers can use the framework to experiment with various visualization paradigms for ontology mapping (and not worry about implementing the algorithms themselves). We also discuss specific cognitive aids for ontology mapping that we have developed and that are available as part of this framework.