Enhanced faceted browsing of a WW1 dataset through ontology alignment

Ontology mappings can be used to transform data in an existing ontology into a form that is more amenable to faceted browsing. We demonstrate the use of complex correspondences to enable more fine-grained browsing of a dataset describing people, places and events from World War One. The values of properties in this dataset contain many pieces of implicit information which has not been modelled in the original ontology. Complex correspondences are used to map the instances into an ontology with a richer hierarchy. Modifying the whole dataset is unfeasible in many applications, due to many factors e.g. the ownership of the data and the wish to continue using it in existing applications. Correspondences combined with the use of a reasoner to infer implicit information can improve the utility of the dataset without permanently modifying it. An evaluation to select a suitable reasoner performing such a task is conducted. The best performing reasoner is then applied in a faceted browser in order to explore the dataset enhanced with the mappings. In addition, the faceted browser is flexible and can be used with custom data and mappings.