AlViz ◾ 99
4.5 Ontology Alignment in AlViz
e basic elements of ontologies are concepts, properties, and instances. ey
describe (by necessary conditions) or dene (by necessary and sucient conditions)
a knowledge domain for a certain purpose. Ontology alignment requires analysis of
these elements or entities to identify overlapping parts in two ontologies.
According to Ehrig [2007] entities are the same if their features are the same or
similar enough. In ontologies, features represent a certain meaning of an entity. We
will list some examples of such features below. If an alignment algorithm determines
low similarity among entities of two ontologies, evidence for an alignment may be
absent. If good similarity is found, we may ...