Edited by: Ernesto Jiménez-Ruiz, Daniel Faria, and Pavel Shvaiko
Ontology alignment is a key interoperability enabler for the Semantic Web. It takes ontologies as input and determines as output an alignment, that is, a set of correspondences between the semantically related entities of those ontologies. Matching ontologies enables the knowledge and data expressed with the matched ontologies to interoperate. The Ontology Matching (OM) workshop (http://ontologymatching.org/) is held annualy and aims at bringing together leaders from academia, industry and user institutions to assess how academic advances are addressing real-world requirements. The OM workshop also conducts an extensive and rigorous evaluation of ontology matching and link discovery approaches through the OAEI (Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative, http://oaei.ontologymatching.org/). The OAEI has played a key role in the benchmarking ontology matching systems by facilitating (i) their comparison on the same basis, and (ii) the reproducibility of the evaluation and results. The OAEI includes different tracks organised by different research groups. Each track contains one or more matching tasks involving small-size (e.g., conference), medium-size (e.g., anatomy), large (e.g., phenotype) or very large (e.g., largebio) ontologies.
This collections gathered (i) relevant papers to Life Sciences submitted to the Ontology Matching 2016 workshop, (ii) system papers with competitive results in the OAEI 2016 biomedical-themed tracks (anatomy, largebio and phenotype), and (iii) biomedical-themed dataset descriptions to benchmark ontology alignment systems.