An evaluation of ontology matching in geo-service applications

Matching between concepts describing the meaning of services representing heterogeneous information sources is a key operation in many application domains, including web service coordination, data integration, peer-to-peer information sharing, query answering, and so on. In this paper we present an evaluation of an ontology matching approach, specifically of structure-preserving semantic matching (SPSM) solution. In particular, we discuss the SPSM approach used to reduce the semantic heterogeneity problem among geo web services and we evaluate the SPSM solution on real world GIS ESRI ArcWeb services. The first experiment included matching of original web service method signatures to synthetically alterated ones. In the second experiment we compared a manual classification of our dataset to the automatic (unsupervised) classification produced by SPSM. The evaluation results demonstrate robustness and good performance of the SPSM approach on a large (ca. 700 000) number of matching tasks.