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Section: New Software and Platforms
OntoSim
Scientific Description
There are many reasons for measuring a distance between ontologies. For example, in semantic social networks, when a peer looks for particular information, it could be more appropriate to send queries to peers having closer ontologies because it will be easier to translate them and it is more likely that such a peer has the information of interest.
OntoSim is a library offering similarity and distance measures between ontology entities as well as between ontologies themselves. It materialises our work towards better ontology proximity measures.
Functional Description
OntoSim is a Java api allowing to compute similarities between ontologies. It relies on the Alignment api for ontology loading so it is quite independent of the ontology api used (Jena or owl api ).
OntoSim provides a framework for designing various kinds of similarities. In particular, we differentiated similarities in the ontology space from those in the alignment space. The latter ones make use of available alignments in a network of ontologies while the former only rely on ontology data. OntoSim is provided with 4 entity measures which can be combined using various aggregation schemes (average linkage, Hausdorff, maximum weight coupling, etc.), 2 kinds of vector space measures (boolean and tfidf ), and 4 alignment space measures. It also features original comparison methods such as agreement/disagreement measures. In addition, the framework embeds external similarity libraries which can be combined to our own.
OntoSim is based on an ontology interface allowing for using ontology parsed with different api s. It is written in Java and is available, under the lgpl licence, at http://ontosim.gforge.inria.fr.