Towards explaining semantic matching

Interoperability among systems using different term vocabularies requires mappings between them. Matching applications generate these 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 how deductions are performed. In this paper, we discuss 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.