Visual Insight into An Ontology Alignment Task

Ontology matching is a critical component in data integration systems whose purpose is to map concepts in a source ontology to semantically related concepts in a target ontology. However, even the best automatic matching algorithms do not guarantee a complete and correct alignment (set of mappings). Thus, ontology matching tools need to rely on the knowledge of domain experts to ensure high quality mappings. Such tools need an interactive user interface to facilitate analytical tasks. In this thesis, we extend the visual analytics capabilities of AgreementMaker with a novel interactive interface that explores the power of coordinated views and of visual operations like matrix reordering to get a deeper understanding of the matching algorithms through the visual displays of the alignments they generate. We tested our visual analytics interface with ontologies from the OAEI Conference Track to illustrate how it can perform analytic operations visually.