Learning Robust Food Ontology Alignment

Abstract

In today’s knowledge society, large number of information systems use many different individual schemes to represent data. Ontologies are a promising approach for formal knowledge representation and their number is growing rapidly. The semantic linking of these ontologies is a necessary prerequisite for establishing interoperability between the large number of services that structure the data with these ontologies. Consequently, the alignment of ontologies becomes a central issue when building a worldwide Semantic Web. There is a need to develop automatic or at least semi-automatic techniques to reduce the burden of manually creating and maintaining alignments. Ontologies are seen as a solution to data heterogeneity on the Web. However, the available ontologies are themselves a source of heterogeneity. On the Web, there are multiple ontologies that refer to the same domain, and with that comes the challenge of a given graph-based system using multiple ontologies whose taxonomy is different, but the semantics are the same. This can be overcome by aligning the ontologies or by finding the correspondence between their components.In this paper, we propose a method for indexing ontologies as a support to a solution for ontology alignment based on a neural network. In this process, for each semantic resource we combine the graph based representations from the RDF2vec model, together with the text representation from the BERT model in order to capture the semantic and structural features. This methodology is evaluated using the FoodOn and OntoFood ontologies, based on the Food Onto Map alignment dataset, which contains 155 unique and validly aligned resources. Using these limited resources, we managed to obtain accuracy of 74% and F1 score of 75% on the test set, which is a promising result that can be further improved in future. Furthermore, the methodology presented in this paper is both robust and ontology-agnostic. It can be applied to any ontology, regardless of the domain.