Results of the Industry-Research co-operation on Heterogeneity


Chosen Use Case: Recruitment
KW Partners: INRIA, FU Berlin
IB Member: WorldWideJobs GmbH

Progress
An initial test case using the recruitment scenario was performed at the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative workshop (at the International Semantic Web Conference 2006). See http://oaei.ontologymatching.org/2006/ There are many research groups working on ontology matching, however what was unique in the experiment planned by this co-operation was to be able to plunge research prototypes in an industrial production environment. We are not aware of any similar attempts to do this. What we learnt from this experience is that this does require a lot of work and commitment from both academic and industrial partners and this can certainly explain the lack of such real experience.

Evaluation

The recruitment scenario was chosen as one of the scenarios for evaluating ontology alignment tools at the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative workshop (OAEI 2006). The uniqueness of this scenario, provided by KnowledgeWeb through the Industry-Research co-operation, was that it was based on a real world business case (recruitment) using industrial ontologies (in this case, based on HR-XML and a skills taxonomy). Alignment is an important aspect of the semantic solution, which requires a matching between a job offer and a job seeker. This was the first scenario in the OAEI workshop to be directly drawn from industry. Results

A lack of results from this initial attempt is tied to the fact that on the industry side, software is not designed with the idea that it will be possible to replace the matching components or that the alignments can be stored in a standard format. This is to be expected since the applications are made with the major aim of functioning and not of testing matchers. This does not mean that matching cannot solve the considered problems. We expect it will take some more years before this situation changes. Certainly a successful experiment would hurry this transition, and we are interested to hear from enterprises with a use case requiring ontology alignment and with the commitment to perform these tests with our support.


The Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative will be continued at the International Semantic Web Conference 2007. See http://oaei.ontologymatching.org/2007/


References
VJérôme Euzenat, Pavel Shvaiko, Ontology matching, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, 2007.
Jérôme Euzenat et al. Results of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative 2006, Proc. ISWC Ontology Matching workshop, Athen (GA US), 2006 http://www.dit.unitn.it/~p2p/OM-2006/7-oaei2006.pdf
Malgorzata Mochol, Anja Jentzsch, Jérôme Euzenat, Applying an Analytic Method for Matching Approach Selection, Proc. ISWC Ontology Matching workshop, Athen (GA US), 2006 http://www.dit.unitn.it/~p2p/OM-2006/4-Mochol-TP-OM'06.pdf



For more information about this Industry-Research co-operation please contact Dr Lyndon Nixon, Knowledge Web Industry Area co-manager nixon@inf.fu-berlin.de