Review Comment:
The paper is an overview of the main foundational ontologies together with ontology matching approaches regarding them in different aspects. The kind of work is a survey, and, from this perspective, it has the clear intent to introduce the topic to the interested scholars at any level of expertise and it has also the summative intent to bring a current overview of the topic to the Semantic Web community in general. The purpose of the survey is made clear in the introduction: to provide a complete account of the role of foundational ontologies in ontology matching and to outline the weaknesses so far emerged and the possibility of future improvements.
I appreciated the accurate and almost complete reporting of the main studies, approaches and initiatives related to the topic. However, in virtue of the very well claimed and circumscribed purpose of this article, I see room for improvement, especially in the systematization and structuring of the paper contents over the different themes brought to the attention of the reader. Hope that the following remarks could help authors go in this direction:
As an overall remark, many interesting subtopics emerge from reading the paper, e.g.,: the lack of comparability studies for the different formal languages used to axiomatized foundational ontologies, the issues of diverse granularity, philosophical vision, lack of vocabulary translations, and all of the overlooked aspects in ontology matching such as linking lexicon to semantics and considering other than equivalence relations only. Since one of the intent of the paper is a _revamping_ of topics that have been touched ten years ago, more of these topics could be anticipated in the introduction, so as to put all of these lively themes in the spotlight and give a sudden taste of the lively and open questions of the field that are going to be treated in the paper. An important aspect that I see very clearly is the lack of a critical view of foundational ontologies, and this aspect should be at least touched in this paper.
Abstract: since the focus is the role of foundational ontologies in ontology matching, I wonder whether it only relates to the weaknesses of matching ontologies or is the scope wider and inclusive of more general aspects afflicting ontologies in general (see also my comment above). Some of them are outlined in the Discussion section. It may be worth anticipating the main considerations emerged from this survey also in the abstract.
Introduction:
left column
- rows 45-50 (text in italic) these few rows are very dense of concepts that are kept at the implicit level and hence may not help beginners catch important aspects related to them, e.g., why it is important to distinguish between class or individual entities? Is it feasible to introduce some (formal) definitions or some (brief) examples to clarify this core passage?
- Row 50-51 “Such distinctions are however key aspects in many applications in Artificial Intelligence”, make an example of provide references to support this claim.
- Right column: row 28 – add “of” to the fragment integration of domain ontologies
- Rows 40-41 and 50-51 please check the two sentences as it seems they are redundant.
- Rows 44-45 please replace the example, since Author is not equivalent to Writer, there are differences between the two.
- Page 2 – left column-rows 2-6: is it only a matter of finding subsumption relations or also of how upper ontologies express/formalizes upper concepts?
Rows 11-15: please provide a reference for this claim or claim the lack of comprehensive studies in this sense.
- Row 25 why only considering the weaknesses and not the strengths also?
And btw: is there room for a comparison of the approaches presented (to see what strengths and/or weaknesses they may have in common, which approaches are good for which of the tasks considered and the like)? If yes, this aspect should be announced here and discussed in the Discussion Section.
Section 2 – Foundational ontologies.
In general, I found that there is room for improvements and better systematization of the aspects presented for each ontology, besides a descriptive approach . For example, some words could be spent to briefly introduce what are the main philosophical views and / or lenses through which upper ontologies were designed / classified/ described.
A table may help summarize all of the information that should be given for any of the foundational ontologies presented, for example: year of design/deployment, number of entities, main structure, axiomatization language and technology of deployment, available formats, official repository url, basic structural information (how more abstract concepts link to more concrete ones), philosophical perspective, maintenance, versioning, backward compatibility, and the like.
Some passages should be clarified, for example:
- row 25 right column, speaking of DOLCE: “an ontology of particulars which adopts a descriptive approach with a clear cognitive bias”, What is this cognitive bias? In what sense it shows a cognitive bias?
- row 2 page 3 speaking of GFO: “considers basic distinctions between individuals.” In what sense this ontology consider them and what are differences with other foundational ontologies in this respect? Please clarify this passage
Also for Section 3 a table could be useful to synthesize the main issues or tentative matching between foundational ontologies, and possibly many results may converge in the summary Table proposed above.
Section 4 begins by introducing a very important and delicate matter: providing a formal semantics to the lexical layer of ontologies. Since this is a very crucial point, more about it should be explained in this Section, maybe more formally and / or by providing examples.
In this Section also the content seems redundant and it should be better systematized, for example, rows 27-31 and 35-42 are redundant and, in general, the fact that WordNet was used to be matched with many foundational ontologies may be said more concisely.
Row 44: please provide a reference for OntoClean, row 13 page 5 add an “f” to foundational
Section 5: please explain the passage in rows 24-26, what do you mean by “low coverage of foundational ontologies in domain ontologies”? This also seems to be a crucial passage.
Rows 41-48 LOM matcher: please clarify whether the four approaches are used with foundational ontologies, since as it is written is a little bit confusing.
Section 6
This Section could be better structured by explicitly providing two subsections "Manual matching" and "Automatic matching". Many reflections about the effectiveness of the two approaches, their differences in performance and some other aspects emerging from their comparison may be worth anticipated here and discussed in the Discussion Section. This seems to be another central point of the paper (see the discussion) so probably this alignment modalities should be systematized better inside the paper.
Section 7 – Discussion Section.
Here the main issues of matching foundational ontologies and domain ontologies are described. The topics should be introduced in a less discursive and more systematic ways of the kind: problem at hand/ solution or future challenge. In this way, they could result better emphasized and more complete.
Here I also see many other themes than ontology matching, for example: the compatibility/comparability issues, natural language definitions vs logical statement issues and, in general, criticalities that are found at other level of the “ontological layer” rather than when matching them. As already remarked, the question should be dealt with in this paper to provide a clearer and more comprehensive framing of the topic.
The Discussion Section needs to be more robust and convincing, maybe by systematizing all of the topics, relying on the approaches presented and commenting them, adding wide-scope criticalities, and better structuring all of those aspects while discussing them, and by giving a more precise perspective of future challenge. This may help better connect the overall contents of the paper and reach the purposes declared in the Abstract and Introduction, provided they are also more connected with the necessary anticipations of the topics treated and emerged from the analysis carried out.
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