In May 2009, we considered that it may be worth trying to close the gap between linking data sources and ontology matching.
We thus issued a call on the linking open data list to data linking tool designers to send us some of their linking specifications so that we can see if it would be possible to express these specification in some expressive alignment format and contribute improve their life. We promised to return feedback on this experiment.
Here is the promised feed-back. We first analysed the available systems to assess their similarities and their differences. This led us to propose a framework for data linking tools.
This experiment showed us that, in spite of similarities between them, data interlinking and ontology matching are different tasks and that, as a consequence, linking specification and alignments are quite different.
However, as can already be seen in some systems, these two tasks can take advantage of each others in several manners. Hence, we intend to issue a proposal for easing their collaboration.