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ASMOV, which stands for Automated Semantic Mapping of Ontologies with Verification, is an automatic ontology alignment tool which produces class-to-class, property-to-property, individual-to-individual mappings. Although it was originally designed to facilitate the integration of heterogeneous systems, using their data source ontologies, it can be used to align ontologies from any domain. For more details about ASMOV see the publications listed on the side bar.

The process diagram shown above depicts the major steps encountered when aligning ontologies using the ASMOV tool. Due to its iterative nature, ASMOV is able to analyze the intermediate alignments produced and eliminate incoherencies whenever found. This feature positioned ASMOV as one of the top three alignment tool at OAEI (three years in row) and as the most coherent alignment tool available¹. Below are some of the Key features of ASMOV:

User Feedback

Although ASMOV is an automated process, it does not ignore the user interaction aspect that may be required to obtain perfect alignments. As a result, the ASMOV User Interface include a component that allows the user to review the alignments generated and address the errors that may exist. Since a single change may render a alignment incoherent, ASMOV will revalidate the alignment while considering the user inputs as partial alignment.

Background Knowledge

By default, the lexical matcher of ASMOV, which calculates the lexical similarity between entities, uses WordNet. However, other background knowledge may be more appropriate for other domains; for example, UMLS  is better suited to alignment medical ontologies than WordNet. Consequently, ASMOV defines interfaces that enables expert users to implement adapters to other background knowledge. Two adapters are included with ASMOV: a WordNet and a UMLS adapters.

Logical Reasoning (Semantic Verification)

The Semantic Verification component within ASMOV make it possible to self validate the pre-alignments2, which lead to a more accurate alignment. The five types of verifications that are performed are illustrated below:

¹ The coherence evaluation was done by the OAEI organizers using the results obtained by the tools that participated in the OAEI 2009 Conference track.
² Pre-alignments are the alignments produced at the end of each one of the ASMOV iteration.

ASMOV