OM-2006

Ontology matching is a key interoperability enabler for the Semantic Web, since it takes the ontologies as input and determines as output correspondences between the semantically related entities of those ontologies. These correspondences can be used for various tasks, such as ontology merging, query answering, data translation, or for navigation on the Semantic Web. Thus, matching ontologies enables the knowledge and data expressed in the matched ontologies to interoperate. The workshop has two goals:

To bring together academic and industry leaders to assess how academic advances are addressing real-world requirements. The workshop will strive to improve academic awareness of industrial needs, and therefore direct research towards those needs. Simultaneously, the workshop will serve to inform industry representatives about existing research efforts that may meet their business needs. Moreover, it is central to the aims of the workshop to evaluate how technologies for ontology matching are going to evolve, which research topics are in the academic agenda and how these can fit emerging business issues.

To conduct an extensive evaluation of ontology matching approaches through the OAEI (Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative) 2006 campaign. The particular focus of this year’s OAEI campaign is on real-world matching tasks from specific domains, such as medicine, food. Therefore, the ontology matching evaluation initiative itself will provide a solid ground for discussion of how well the current approaches are meeting business needs.