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VOAR: A Visual and Integrated Ontology Alignment Environment

Ontology alignment is a key process for enabling interoperability between ontology-based systems in the Linked Open Data age. From two input ontologies, this process generates an alignment (set of correspondences) between them. In this paper we present VOAR, a new web-based environment for ontology alignment visualization and manipulation. Within this graphical environment, users can manually create/edit correspondences and apply a set of operations on alignments (filtering, merge, difference, etc.). VOAR allows invoking external ontology matching systems that implement a specific alignment interface, so that the generated alignments can be manipulated within the environment. Evaluating multiple alignments together against a reference one can also be carried out, using classical evaluation metrics (precision, recall and f-measure). The status of each correspondence with respect to its presence or absence in reference alignment is visually represented. Overall, the main new aspect of VOAR is the visualization and manipulation of alignments at schema level, in an integrated, visual and web-based environment.