Alignment API

[Download] [Install & use] [Tutorial] [Documentation] [Release notes] [SVN access] [Server]

New Alignment API 4.0. Get it!

# Alignment API and Alignment Server

The Alignment API is an API and implementation for expressing and sharing ontology alignments.

Using ontologies is the priviledged way to achieve interoperability among heterogeneous systems within the Semantic web. However, as the ontologies underlying two systems are not necessarily compatible, they may in turn need to be reconcilied. Ontology reconciliation requires most of the time to find the correspondences between entities (e.g., classes, objects, properties) occuring in the ontologies. We call a set of such correspondences an alignment. We have designed a format for expressing alignments in a uniform way. The goal of this format is to be able to share on the web the available alignments. The format is expressed in RDF, so it is freely extensible.

The Alignment API itself is a Java description of tools for accessing the common format. It defines four main interfaces (Alignment, Cell, Relation and Evaluator) and proposes the following services:

- Storing, finding, and sharing alignments;
- Piping alignment algorithms (improving an existing alignment);
- Manipulating (thresholding and hardening);
- Generating processing output (transformations, axioms, rules);
- Comparing alignments.

Here is the new Alignment API and implementation homepage. It is hosted by gforge.inria.fr which helps the developement process (by integrating theses pages within the SVN repository for instance).

If you use this software and want to give it credit, please cite:
Jérôme Euzenat, An API for ontology alignment, in: Proc. 3rd conference on international semantic web conference (ISWC), Hiroshima (JP), Lecture notes in computer science 3298:698-712, 2004

## Main resources

Download page and Release notes
  Official releases.
Install & use
  Quick start with the API.
Alignment Server
  Installing a server that will generate and store alignments
Tutorial
  Walk through the Alignment API features
Documentation
  Supposed to be a reference manual, but not fully complete.

## Technical documentations

Web service interface for the Alignment server
  REST and SOAP specification of the web service interface
Wrapping ontology APIs
  The package contains an ontology API wrapper called ontowrap allowing for using the Alignment API with various ontology APIs (JENA, OWL API 1.0, 3.0, soon SKOS).
Alignment format and the Expressive and Declarative Ontology Alignment Language (EDOAL)
  How to express alignments that the API can input or output.
Wordnet extension
  How to use wordnet within the API
Registered annotations
  List of extension labels that are declared (and should not be used by others)
Eval
  Using the API for evaluating alignments.

## Additional resources

Bug and feature trackers
  Notify your bugs and request features here
SVN access
  You can browse and you can join.
Included libraries and dependencies
  Wonderful components that the Alignement API and server use.
License
  Basically, open source (LGPL).
Credits
  When it is due.
Systems using the API
  Because we are proud to be used.

## Plug-ins

NeOn Alignment plug-in
  Alignment API and server plug-in for the NeOn toolkit.

## External resources

OAEI
  The Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative: Benchmarks for evaluating ontology matchers and benchmarking campaigns (since 2004).
ontologymatching.org
  The central resource for ontology matching and alignment information.