Fostering ontology alignment sharing: a general-purpose RDF mapping format.

RDF has established in the last years as the language for describing, publishing and sharing biomedical resources. Following this trend, a great amount of RDF-based data sources, as well as ontologies, have appeared. Using a common language as RDF has provided a unified syntactic for sharing resources, but the semantics remain as the main cause of heterogeneity, hampering data integration and homogenization efforts. To overcome this issue, ontology alignment based solutions have been typically used. However, alignment information is usually codified using ad-hoc formats. In this paper, we present a general purpose ontology mapping format, totally independent from the homogenization approach to be applied. The format is accompanied with a Java API that offers mapping construction and parsing features, as well as some basic algorithms for applying it to data translation solutions.