Knowledge-based sense disambiguation (almost) for all structures

Structural disambiguation is acknowledged as a very real and frequent problem for many semantic-aware applications. In this paper, we propose a unified answer to sense disambiguation on a large variety of structures both at data and metadata level such as relational schemas, XML data and schemas, taxonomies, and ontologies. Our knowledge-based approach achieves a general applicability by converting the input structures into a common format and by allowing users to tailor the extraction of the context to the specific application needs and structure characteristics. Flexibility is ensured by supporting the combination of different disambiguation methods together with different information extracted from different sources of knowledge. Further, we support both assisted and completely automatic semantic annotation tasks, while several novel feedback techniques allow us to improve the initial disambiguation results without necessarily requiring user intervention. An extensive evaluation of the obtained results shows the good effectiveness of the proposed solutions on a large variety of structure-based information and disambiguation requirements.