Ontology Alignment—A Survey with Focus on Visually Supported Semi-Automatic Techniques

Semantic technologies are of paramount importance to the future Internet. The reuse and integration of semantically described resources, such as data or services, necessitates the bringing of ontologies into mutual agreement. Ontology alignment deals with the discovery of correspondences between concepts and relations from different ontologies. Alignment provides the key ingredient to semantic interoperability. This paper gives an overview on the state of the art in the field of visually supported semi-automatic alignment techniques and presents recent trends and developments. Particular attention is given to user interfaces and visualization techniques supporting involvement of humans in the alignment process. We derive and summarize requirements for visual semi-automatic alignment systems, provide an overview of existing approaches, and discuss the possibilities for further improvements and future research.