Evaluation of Semi-automated Ontology Instance Migration

Ontology instance migration is one of the challenges in knowledge management. It becomes even more complex in distributed settings when, for example, several autonomous agents use partial assertional knowledge in a domain that is formalized by different though semantically overlapping descriptive theories. Agents exchange instances of their ontologies when cooperate. Such an exchange is essentially the migration of the assertional part of an ontology to other ontologies owned by different agents. The paper presents our method and tool support for migrating instances between different semantically overlapping ontologies. The method is based on the use of manually coded formal rules describing the changes between the input and the output ontologies. The tool to support the process is implemented as a plug-in to Cadence Project Navigator software. The main contribution of the paper is in presenting the results of the evaluation of this tool. It reports about the setup for our evaluation experiments, the metrics used for measuring the quality of instance migration, the ontologies that have been chosen as the experimental data, and the evaluation results. Evaluation results are satisfactory and suggest some directions for the future work.