The main aim of this track is to motivate and attract ontology matching systems to work on matching ontologies and thesauri used in the biodiversity and ecology domains and available via the BiodivPortal ontology repository. In the current edition, we decided to keep the matching task to find alignments between the Environment Ontology (ENVO) and the Semantic Web for Earth and Environment Technology Ontology (SWEET) as these two ontologies have frequent updates.
We address since 2021, the alignment of two new biological taxonomies with rather different but complementary scopes: the well-known, world-wide NCBI taxonomy, and TAXREF-LD [3], a more fine-grained, manually curated taxonomy that spans French metropolitan and overseas territories. A challenging aspect is the discrepancies between (1) the size and scope of both taxonomies, and (2) the RDF model to account for taxonomy and nomenclatural information.
In 2023, we partnered with the EcoPortal project to include two new matching tasks involving important thesauri in environmental sciences (originally developed in SKOS): finding alignments between the Macroalgae Traits Thesaurus (MACROALGAE) and the Macrozoobenthos Traits Thesaurus (MACROZOOBENTHOS) and between the Fish Traits Thesaurus (FISH) and the Zooplankton Traits Thesaurus (ZOOPLANKTON).The results have been generated and are available now: link to results page.
The biodiv dataset (4 ontologies and 2 reference alignments, together with modules for the bigger matching task) is available for download here.
The evaluation of the track will be run with support of the MELT framework. This requires that you wrap your matching system in a way that allows us to execute it using MELT (see MELT evaluation for OAEI 2024).
The track is supported by the AquaDiva and the NFDI4Biodiversity projects.
We would like to thank Jessica Titocci, Martina Pulieri and Ilaria Rosati for their support and for providing the datasets for the MACROALGAE-MACROZOOBENTHOS and FISH-ZOOPLANKTON tasks.
[1] Alsayed Algergawy, Naouel Karam, Amir Laadhar, Franck Michel: Too big to match: a strategy around matching tasks for large taxonomies. OM@ISWC 2022: 67-72
[2] Naouel Karam, Abderrahmane Khiat, Alsayed Algergawy, Melanie Sattler, Claus Weiland, Marco Schmidt: Matching biodiversity and ecology ontologies: challenges and evaluation results. Knowledge Eng. Review 35: e9 (2020).
[3] F. Michel, O. Gargominy, S. Tercerie and C. Faron-Zucker: A Model to Represent Nomenclatural and Taxonomic Information as Linked Data. Application to the French Taxonomic Register, TAXREF. 2nd workshop on Semantics for Biodiversity (S4BioDiv), 2017.