Processing ontology alignments with SPARQL

Abstract

Solving problems raised by heterogeneous ontologies can be achieved by matching the ontologies and processing the resulting alignments. This is typical of data mediation in which the data must be translated from one knowledge source to another . We propose to solve the data translation problem, i.e. the processing part, using the SPARQL query language. Indeed, such a language is particularly adequate for extracting data from one ontology and, through its CONSTRUCT statement, for generating new data. We present examples of such transformations, but we also present a set of example correspondences illustrating the needs for particular representation constructs, such as aggregates, value- generating built-in functions and paths, which are missing from SPARQL. Hence, we advocate the use of two SPARQL extensions providing these missing features.