Towards Design Patterns for Ontology Alignment

Aligning ontologies is a crucial and tedious task. Matching algorithms and tools provide support to facilitate the task of the user in defining correspondences between ontologies entities. However, automatic matching is actually limited to the detection of simple one to one correspondences to be further refined by the user. We propose in this paper the use of correspondence patterns as a tool to assist the design of ontology alignments. Based on existing research on patterns in the fields of software and ontology engineering, we propose a pattern template as an helper to develop a correspondence patterns library. We give ways towards the representation of patterns using an appropriate correspondence representation formalism: the Alignment Ontology.