OM - 2026

Ontology matching is a key interoperability enabler for the Semantic Web, as well as a useful technique in some classical data integration tasks dealing with the semantic heterogeneity problem. 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. These correspondences can be used for various tasks, such as ontology merging, data interlinking, query answering or navigation over knowledge graphs. Thus, matching ontologies enables the knowledge and data expressed with the matched ontologies to interoperate.

The workshop has three goals:

• To bring together leaders from academia, industry and user institutions to assess how academic advances are addressing real-world requirements. The workshop will strive to improve academic awareness of industrial and final user needs, and therefore, direct research towards those needs. Simultaneously, the workshop will serve to inform industry and user representatives about existing research efforts that may meet their requirements. The workshop will also investigate how the ontology matching technology is going to evolve, especially with respect to data interlinking, process matching, web table and knowledge graph matching tasks.
• To conduct an extensive and rigorous evaluation of ontology matching and instance matching (link discovery) approaches through the OAEI (Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative) 2026 campaign.
• To examine similarities and differences from other, old, new and emerging, techniques and usages, such as process matching, web table matching or knowledge embeddings.

Audience:

The workshop encourages participation from academia, industry and user institutions with the emphasis on theoretical and practical aspects of ontology matching. On the one side, we expect representatives from industry and user organizations to present business cases and their requirements for ontology matching. On the other side, we expect academic participants to present their approaches vis-a-vis those requirements. The workshop provides an informal setting for researchers and practitioners from different related initiatives to meet and benefit from each other's work and requirements.

This year, in sync with the main conference, we encourage submissions specifically devoted to: (i) datasets, benchmarks, software tools/services, APIs, methodologies, protocols and metrics (not necessarily related to OAEI), and (ii) application of ontology and instance matching technology in a specific domain and assessment of its usefulness to the final users.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Business and use cases for matching (e.g., big, open, closed data)
• Requirements to matching from specific application scenarios (e.g., public sector)
• Application of matching techniques in real-world scenarios (e.g., in cloud, with mobile apps)
• Formal foundations and frameworks for matching
• Novel matching methods, including link prediction, ontology-based data access
• Matching and knowledge graphs
• Matching and deep learning
• Matching and embeddings
• Matching and big data
• Matching and linked data
• Instance matching, data interlinking and relations between them
• Privacy-aware matching
• Process model matching
• Large-scale and efficient matching techniques
• Matcher selection, combination and tuning
• User involvement (including both technical and organizational aspects)
• Explanations in matching
• Social and collaborative matching
• Uncertainty in matching
• Expressive alignments
• Reasoning with alignments
• Alignment coherence and debugging
• Alignment management
• FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) alignments
• Matching for traditional applications (e.g., data science)
• Matching for emerging applications (e.g., web tables, knowledge graphs)

Contributions to the workshop can be made in terms of technical papers and posters/statements of interest addressing different issues of ontology matching as well as participating in the OAEI 2026 campaign. Long technical papers should be of max. 12 pages. Short technical papers should be of max. 6 pages. Posters/statements of interest should not exceed 3 pages. References and appendix are excluded from the page limits and the submissions are single blind.

All contributions have to be prepared using the CEUR-ART, 1-column style. Overleaf page for LaTeX users is available at overleaf.com, while offline version with the style files is available from ceur-ws.org.

Submissions should be uploaded in PDF format through the workshop submission site at:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=om2026

Contributors to the OAEI 2026 campaign have to follow the campaign conditions and schedule at https://oaei.ontologymatching.org/2026/.

Important dates (all AoE):

• July 24th, 2026: Deadline for the submission of papers
• August 21st, 2026: Deadline for the notification of acceptance/rejection
• September 20th, 2026: Camera ready submission of the paper
• October 25th or 26th, 2026: OM-2026, The Nicolaus Hotel, Bari, Italy

Contributions will be refereed by the Program Committee. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings as a volume of CEUR-WS as well as indexed on DBLP. By submitting a paper, the authors accept the CEUR-WS and DBLP publishing rules (CC-BY 4.0 license model).

Organizing Committee: