Towards Explaining Semantic Matching

Interoperability among systems using different term vocabularies requires some mapping between terms in the vocabularies. Matching applications generate such mappings. When the matching process utilizes term meaning (instead of simply relying on syntax), we refer to the process as semantic matching. If users are to use the results of matching applications, they need information about the mappings. They need access to the sources that were used to determine relations between terms and potentially they need to understand any deductions performed on the information. In this paper, we present our approach to explaining semantic matching. Our initial work uses a satisfiability-based approach to determine subsumption and semantic matches and uses the Inference Web and its OWL encoding of the proof markup language to explain the mappings. The Inference Web solution also includes a registration of the OWL reasoning component of JTP, as well as other reasoner registrations, and thus provides a foundation for explaining semantic matching systems.