The SEALS project was dedicated to the evaluation of semantic web technologies. To that extent, it created a platform for easing this evaluation, organizing evaluation campaigns, and building the community of tool providers and tool users around this evaluation activity. The SEALS platform has been progressively integrated within OAEI evaluation. It is now routingly used in ontology matching evaluation.
To ease communication between participants and track organizers, this year we will have a OAEI contact point in the person of Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz. The role of the contact point is defined below.
Participants have to follow this procedure (some participants have already conducted the first two steps):
Previously, some tracks had experienced problems for running all the the tools under the same JDK version. Most participants continue to use JDK 1.6.xx, but new participants tend to use JDK 1.7. To facilitate the evaluation process please try to run your tool under this version (JDK 1.7). If it is not possible for you, please keep us informed.
Once these steps have been conducted, we run all systems on the SEALS platform and generate the results. Each track organizer will decide whether the results will finally be presented via the SEALS portal or if they will be presented via result pages (similar as in the years before), or both.
We have prepared a comprehensive PDF-tutorial for wrapping an ontology matching tool and testing your tool. You can download it here:
In the tutorial there are mentioned several additional materials that are available here.
We detected some problems in the past when using libraries in conflict with the libraries used by the SEALS client. We encourage when possible to use the same versions as the SEALS client. Please check the maven dependencies of the SEALS client here.
We also encourage developers to use the Alignment API. For developers using it, the following ant package is available for packaging and validating the wrapped tools:
Within the Tutorial we show how you can use your wrapped tool to run locally a full evaluation. Thus, you can compute precision and recall for all of those testsuites listed in the track web pages at any time in your development process.
The SEALS client for the interactive track works exactly the same way as for the other tracks. It only includes one additional Class "Oracle" in the "eu.sealsproject.omt.client.interactive" package. This class provides the method "check" which takes two strings and a relation as input (uri1, uri2, relation) which are the URIs of two concepts and the relation can be one of these three: "=" (equivalence), "<" (subsumed-by), ">" (subsumes). The method returns true, if the correspondence between these entities holds and false otherwise.
An example call: Oracle.check("http://cmt#Paper", "http://ekaw#Paper", "=")
For testing purposes you should include the SEALS client as a library. However you must not include the SEALS client jar file within your wrapped system. When starting the client itself, the class should be loaded without problems.
Not all tracks are interactive, to check whether the track is interactive, you can call the method Oracle.isInteractive(). This method returns a boolean value, TRUE if it is an interactive track and false otherwise.
A system that plans to participate in one of the SEALS supported tracks, will be evaluated for all tracks supported by SEALS. This means that it is no longer allowed to participate in one track, e.g., to participate in just the anatomy track. We know that this can be a problem for some systems that have specifically been developed for, e.g., matching biomedical ontologies. However, this point can still be emphasized in the specific results paper that you have to write about your system. In other words, if the results generated for some specific track are not good at all, there is a place where this can be explained in the appropriate way.
Please note that, a matcher may want to behave differently given what it is provided with as ontologies; however, this should not be based on features specific of the tracks (e.g., there is a specific string in the URL, or a specific class name) but on features of the ontologies (e.g., there are no instances or labels are in German).
Do not hesitate to contact Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz : ernesto [.] jimenez [.] ruiz [at] gmail [.] com for any questions, which can be related to the overall procedure, to problems in tool-wrapping, and so on ... and do not forget to send us your evaluation request (the earlier, the better)!
While developing and improving the tutorial, we have been in contact with several matching tool developer to have some 'reference' matcher for testing our tutorial and the client that comes with it. Thanks go out to Hua Wei Khong Watson (Eff2match), Peigang Xu (Falcon-OA), Faycal Hamdi (Taxomap), Peng Wang (Lily), Zhichun Wang (RiMOM), and Cosmin Stroe (AgreementMaker).