Thesaurus mapping: a challenge for ontology alignment?
Dominique Ritze, Kai Eckert · MADOC (University of Mannheim) · 2012
Thesauri are hierarchical knowledge organization systems commonly used in libraries to categorize and index publications. While sometimes referred to as so-called lightweight ontologies [4], they actually fundamentally differ from ontologies in several aspects. Nevertheless, as thesauri are actively used, constantly maintained and improved, they offer an interesting background knowledge for semantic applications. This year, we reinstantiated the OAEI library track 1, i.e., we provide the ontology matching community with the challenge to create alignments between thesauri. First, we aim for interesting insights into the differences between ontologies and thesauri. Second, we try to further integrate existing thesauri by means of new alignments which leads to better search experiences within library systems. From 2007 to 2009, there has already been a library track in the OAEI [1]. They focused on matching thesauri describing the same topic but at a different level of granularity. For our track, we selected two very comparable thesauri with topical overlaps. To make sure that the created alignments are indeed used, we work closely together with the maintaining institutions. We apply the following two thesauri: STW: The Thesaurus for Economics (STW) provides vocabulary on any economic subject: more than 6,000 standardized subject headings (in English and German)