A Semantic Web Repository for Managing and Querying Aligned Knowledge

Ontology alignment is the task of matching concepts and terminology from multiple ontologies. Ontology alignment is especially relevant in the semantic web domain as RDF documents and OWL ontologies are quite heterogeneous, yet often describe related concepts. The end goal for ontology matching is to allow the knowledge sets to interoperate. To achieve this goal, it is necessary for queries to return results that include knowledge, and inferred knowledge, from multiple datasets and terminologies, using the alignment information. Furthermore, ontology alignment is not an exact science, and concept matchings often involve uncertainty. The goal of this paper is to provide a semantic web repository that supports applying alignments to the dataset and reasoning with alignments. Our goal is to provide high performance queries that return results that include inference across alignment matchings, and rank results using certainty information. Our semantic web repository uses distributed inference and probabilistic reasoning to allow datasets to be efficiently updated with ontology alignments. We materialize the inferred, aligned data and make it available in efficient queries.