Alignment API enables ontology matchers to collaborate with a shared format and interface, streamlining and simplifying the development process.
Ontology reconciliation often requires finding correspondences between entities within different ontologies, such as classes, objects, and properties. The Alignment API offers a uniform way to express such correspondences, using an RDF format that can easily be shared on the web.
Some key features of the Alignment API include storing, finding, and sharing alignments, piping alignment algorithms, manipulating alignments through thresholding and hardening, generating processing output such as transformations, axioms, and rules, and comparing alignments.
This release of the Alignment API includes several updates and improvements. Language dependent alignments have been suppressed, and the OWLAPIAlignment has been deprecated in favor of ObjectAlignment. The API has been completely reimplemented with the onto package, and an abstract ontology package has been added to allow for API changes. Additionally, a Jena 2.5 ontology plug-in is now available, and the HTML renderer has been changed to XHTML+RDFa.
Other improvements include making Alignment iterable, improving the NeOn plug-in and upgrading to version 1.1, and correcting bugs in the web service and AlignmentParser. The code has also been passed through lint and updated to Java 1.5 generics, and unit testing has been added.
Overall, the Alignment API is an essential tool for developers working with ontologies in the Semantic web, offering a range of features for aligning and reconciling ontologies.
Version 3.3: N/A