Chinese whispers and connected alignments
Oliver Kutz, Immanuel Normann, Till Mossakowski, and Dirk Walther · BIROn (Birkbeck, University of London) · 2010
Abstract. This paper investigates the idea to treat repositories of ontologies as inter-linked networks of ontologies, formally captured by the notion of a hyperontology. We apply standard matching algorithms to automatically create the linkage structure of the repository by performing pairwise matching. Subsequently, we define a modular work-flow to construct combinations of alignments for any finite number of ontologies. This workflow employs and makes interoperable several tools from the ontology engineering world, comprising matching, reasoning, and structuring tools, and supports in particular modular ontology extraction based on alignment, and a study and empirical analysis of (in)consistency propagation in connected alignments (the Chinese Whispers problem).