Supporting ontology alignment tasks by organizing ontology mappings using edge bundling

Abstract

Ontologies are commonly used for knowledge representation and to exchange information between multiple applications. When similar information is represented by different ontologies, information sharing requires a mapping between corresponding pairs of entities. While ontology alignment have been developed to support such tasks, they generally do not offer entirely complete and precise mappings. Consequently, an important interactive aspect of the alignment process is the validation of automatically generated mappings and the addition of new mappings, by a knowledge manager. While visual interfaces exist to support these tasks, showing a large number of mappings can result in a significant amount of visual clutter. To address this issue, an edge bundling approach has been adapted to the constraints of an existing alignment interface. A user study was designed and conducted to evaluate the value of edge bundling in this context, with positive results for both mapping validation and addition tasks.