Web explanations for semantic heterogeneity discovery

Managing semantic heterogeneity is a complex task. One solution involves matching like terms to each other. We view Match as an operator that takes two graph-like structures (e.g., concept hierarchies or ontologies) and returns a mapping between the nodes of the graphs that correspond semantically to each other. While some state of the art matching systems may produce effective mappings, these mappings may not be intuitively obvious to human users. In order for users to trust the mappings, and thus, use them, they need information about them (e.g., they need access to the sources that were used to determine semantic correspondences between terms). In this paper we describe how a matching system can explain its answers using the Inference Web (IW) infrastructure thus making the matching process transparent. The proposed solution is based on the assumption that mappings are computed by logical reasoning. There, S-Match, a semantic matching system, produces proofs and explanations for mappings it has discovered.