Welcome to the KitAMO web site.
Many ontologies, each with their own focus, have been developed in different areas. These ontologies often contain overlapping information. In applications using multiple ontologies it is therefore of interest to know the relations between terms in different ontologies. For instance, companies may want to use community standard ontologies and use them together with company-specific ontologies. Applications may need to use ontologies from different areas or from different views on one area. Ontology builders may want to use already existing ontologies as the basis for the creation of new ontologies by extending the existing ontologies or by combining knowledge from different smaller ontologies. We say that we align two ontologies when we define the relations between terms in the different ontologies. We merge two ontologies when we, based on the alignment relations between the ontologies, create a new ontology containing the knowledge included in the source ontologies.
There exist a number of systems that support users in aligning ontologies. These systems use different techniques, but it is not clear how well these techniques perform for different types of ontologies. Also, it is not clear whether and how different techniques could be combined to provide better alignments. The study of the properties, the evaluation and comparison of the alignment strategies and their combinations, would give us valuable insight in how the strategies could be used in the best way. It would also lead to recommendations on how to improve the alignment techniques. However, relatively few comparative evaluations on ontology merging and alignment have been performed and no advanced tools for supporting these kinds of evaluations exist yet.
KitAMO is a tool for evaluating ontology alignment strategies and their combinations. It supports the study, evaluation and comparison of alignment strategies and their combinations based on their performance and the quality of their alignments on test cases. It also provides support for the analysis of the evaluation results.
We intend to make KitAMO available in the future. For questions, please contact
When refering to KitAMO, please cite:
Lambrix P, Tan H,
`A Tool for Evaluating Ontology Alignment Strategies',
Journal on Data Semantics, LNCS 4380, VIII:182-202, 2007.