Ontology Matching: State of the Art and Future Challenges

TLDR

Ontology matching has progressed over years, yet questions remain about its continued advancement, significance, and promising directions. The authors review current ontology matching techniques and evaluation results to identify promising research directions and challenges. They conduct a comprehensive review of recent ontology matching evaluations and propose challenge-oriented insights to guide future research. The review reveals measurable but slowing progress in ontology matching, suggesting that major gains require tackling key challenges.

Abstract

After years of research on ontology matching, it is reasonable to consider several questions: is the field of ontology matching still making progress? Is this progress significant enough to pursue further research? If so, what are the particularly promising directions? To answer these questions, we review the state of the art of ontology matching and analyze the results of recent ontology matching evaluations. These results show a measurable improvement in the field, the speed of which is albeit slowing down. We conjecture that significant improvements can be obtained only by addressing important challenges for ontology matching. We present such challenges with insights on how to approach them, thereby aiming to direct research into the most promising tracks and to facilitate the progress of the field.