A practical alignment service should be flexible enough to handle the varied alignment scenarios that arise in the real world, while minimizing the need for manual configuration. MAPLE, an orchestration framework for ontology alignment, supports this goal by coordinating a few loosely coupled actors, which communicate and cooperate to solve a matching task using explicit metadata about the input ontologies, other available resources and the task itself. The alignment task is thus summarized by a report listing its characteristics and suggesting alignment strategies. The schema of the report is based on several metadata vocabularies, among which the Lime module of the OntoLex-Lemon model is particularly important, summarizing the lexical content of the input ontologies and describing external language resources that may be exploited for performing the alignment. In this paper, we propose a REST API that enables the participation of downstream alignment services in the process orchestrated by MAPLE, helping them self-adapt in order to handle heterogeneous alignment tasks and scenarios. The realization of this alignment orchestration effort has been performed through two main phases: we first described its API as an OpenAPI specification (a la API-first), which we then exploited to generate server stubs and compliant client libraries. Finally, we switched our focus to the integration of existing alignment systems, with one fully integrated system and an additional one being worked on, in the effort to propose the API as a valuable addendum to any system being developed.

OntoLex-Lemon is a collection of RDF vocabularies for specifying the verbalization of ontologies in natural language. Beyond its original scope, OntoLex-Lemon, as well as its predecessor Monnet lemon, found application in the Linguistic Linked Open Data cloud to represent and interlink language resources on the Semantic Web. Unfortunately, generic ontology and RDF editors were considered inconvenient to use with OntoLex-Lemon because of its complex design patterns and other peculiarities, including indirection, reification and subtle integrity constraints. This perception led to the development of dedicated editors, trading the flexibility of RDF in combining different models (and the features already available in existing RDF editors) for a more direct and streamlined editing of OntoLex-Lemon patterns. In this paper, we investigate on the benefits gained by extending an already existing RDF editor, VocBench 3, with capabilities closely tailored to OntoLex-Lemon and on the challenges that such extension implies. The outcome of such investigation is twofold: a vertical assessment of a new editor for OntoLex-Lemon and, in the broader scope of RDF editor design, a new perspective on which flexibility and extensibility characteristics an editor should meet in order to cover new core modeling vocabularies, for which OntoLex-Lemon represents a use case.

Ontology mediators often demand extensive configuration, or even the adaptation of the input ontologies for remedying unsupported modeling patterns. In this paper we propose MAPLE (MAPping Architecture based on Linguistic Evidences), an architecture and software platform that semi-automatically solves this configuration problem, by reasoning on metadata about the linguistic expressivity of the input ontologies, the available mediators and other components relevant to the mediation task. In our methodology mediators should access the input ontologies through uniform interfaces abstracting many low-level details, while depending on generic third-party linguistic resources providing external information. Given a pair of ontologies to reconcile, MAPLE ranks the available mediators according to their ability to exploit most of the input ontologies content, while coping with the exhibited degree of linguistic heterogeneity. MAPLE provides the chosen mediator with concrete linguistic resources and suitable implementations of the required interfaces. The resulting mediators are more robust, as they are isolated from many low-level issues, and their applicability and performance may increase over time as new and better resources and other components are made available. To sustain this trend, we foresee the use of the Web as a large scale repository.