Collaborative Maintenance of EDOAL Alignments in VocBench

Ontology Alignment, intended in its broadest meaning of alignment between datasets of different nature – thesauri, ontologies, and even mere instance data – is a well-known practice aiming at realizing semantic links between datasets on the (Semantic) Web. Considerable investigation has been carried on the automatic computation of alignments and on how to assess the quality of such process. This is indeed a critical aspect, considering the non-trivial size of many datasets. However, since human intervention is in any case essential, no less care should be paid on scalability both in terms of distribution of work and of maintenance of achieved results within the lifecycle of the aligned resources. In this paper we guide the reader through the diverse solutions that have been implemented in VocBench, a collaborative editing platform for RDF datasets, under a holistic approach to collaborative alignment development and maintenance.