Reasoning by analogy in the generation of domain acceptable ontology refinements

Refinements generated for a knowledge base often involve the learning of new knowledge to be added to or replace existing parts of a knowledge base. However, the justifiability of the refinement in the context of the domain (domain acceptability) is often overlooked. The work reported in this paper describes an approach to the generation of domain acceptable refinements for incomplete and incorrect ontology individuals through reasoning by analogy using existing domain knowledge. To illustrate this approach, individuals for refinement are identified during the application of a knowledge-based system, EIRA; when EIRA fails in its task, areas of its domain ontology are identified as requiring refinement. Refinements are subsequently generated by identifying and reasoning with similar individuals from the domain ontology. To evaluate this approach EIRA has been applied to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) domain. An evaluation (by a domain expert) of the refinements generated by EIRA has indicated that this approach successfully produces domain acceptable refinements

Analyzing impacts of change operations in evolving ontologies

Ontologies evolve over time to adapt to the dynamically changing knowledge in a domain. The evolution includes addition of new entities and modification or deletion of obsolete entities. These changes could have impacts on the remaining entities and dependent systems of the ontology. In this paper, we address the impacts of changes prior to their permanent implementation. To this end, we identify possible structural and semantic impacts and propose a bottom-up change impact analysis method which contains two phases. The first phase focuses on analyzing impacts of atomic change operations and the second phase focuses on analyzing impacts of composite changes which include impact cancellation, balancing and transformation due to implementation of two or more atomic changes. This method provides crucial information on the impacts and could be used for selecting evolution strategies and conducting what-if analysis before evolving the ontologies

An Editorial Workflow Approach For Collaborative Ontology Development

The widespread use of ontologies in the last years has raised new challenges for their development and maintenance. Ontology development has transformed from a process normally performed by one ontology engineer into a process performed collaboratively by a team of ontology engineers, who may be geographically distributed and play different roles. For example, editors may propose changes, while authoritative users approve or reject them following a well defined process. This process, however, has only been partially addressed by existing ontology development methods, methodologies, and tool support. Furthermore, in a distributed environment where ontology editors may be working on local copies of the same ontology, strategies should be in place to ensure that changes in one copy are reflected in all of them. In this paper, we propose a workflow-based model for the collaborative development of ontologies in distributed environments and describe the components required to support them. We illustrate our model with a test case in the fishery domain from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)

Git4Voc: Git-based Versioning for Collaborative Vocabulary Development

Collaborative vocabulary development in the context of data integration is the process of finding consensus between the experts of the different systems and domains. The complexity of this process is increased with the number of involved people, the variety of the systems to be integrated and the dynamics of their domain. In this paper we advocate that the realization of a powerful version control system is the heart of the problem. Driven by this idea and the success of Git in the context of software development, we investigate the applicability of Git for collaborative vocabulary development. Even though vocabulary development and software development have much more similarities than differences there are still important differences. These need to be considered within the development of a successful versioning and collaboration system for vocabulary development. Therefore, this paper starts by presenting the challenges we were faced with during the creation of vocabularies collaboratively and discusses its distinction to software development. Based on these insights we propose Git4Voc which comprises guidelines how Git can be adopted to vocabulary development. Finally, we demonstrate how Git hooks can be implemented to go beyond the plain functionality of Git by realizing vocabulary-specific features like syntactic validation and semantic diffs

Improving Ontology Recommendation and Reuse in WebCORE by Collaborative Assessments

In this work, we present an extension of CORE [8], a tool for Collaborative Ontology Reuse and Evaluation. The system receives an informal description of a specific semantic domain and determines which ontologies from a repository are the most appropriate to describe the given domain. For this task, the environment is divided into three modules. The first component receives the problem description as a set of terms, and allows the user to refine and enlarge it using WordNet. The second module applies multiple automatic criteria to evaluate the ontologies of the repository, and determines which ones fit best the problem description. A ranked list of ontologies is returned for each criterion, and the lists are combined by means of rank fusion techniques. Finally, the third component uses manual user evaluations in order to incorporate a human, collaborative assessment of the ontologies. The new version of the system incorporates several novelties, such as its implementation as a web application; the incorporation of a NLP module to manage the problem definitions; modifications on the automatic ontology retrieval strategies; and a collaborative framework to find potential relevant terms according to previous user queries. Finally, we present some early experiments on ontology retrieval and evaluation, showing the benefits of our system

Community-oriented software engineering ontology evolution

Software Engineering Ontology (SE Ontology) defines common shareable software engineering knowledge and typically provides software engineering concepts: what the concepts are, how they are related, and why they are related. These concepts facilitate common understanding of software engineering knowledge across multiple international software development sites. The SE Ontology is in machine understandable form to facilitate meaningful communication for remote social members. These social members use the SE Ontology but are not involved in the development process. Most existing ontologies including the SE Ontology are designed by individuals or small group of experts, not actual ontology users nor various groups of experts. It is effective if the ontology users can contribute in the process of creating and maintaining the ontologies they use. Social networking is becoming more prevalent enabling people to engage in remote collaboration to form goal-directed social networks. In this paper, we propose a social network based approach for ontology evolution for the SE Ontology. We analyze ontology evolution of the SE Ontology and propose the social network based approach for making ontology evolution more responsive to users? needs

Pragmatic Ontology Evolution: Reconciling User Requirements and Application Performance

Increasingly, organizations are adopting ontologies to describe their large catalogues of items. These ontologies need to evolve regularly in response to changes in the domain and the emergence of new requirements. An important step of this process is the selection of candidate concepts to include in the new version of the ontology. This operation needs to take into account a variety of factors and in particular reconcile user requirements and application performance. Current ontology evolution methods focus either on ranking concepts according to their relevance or on preserving compatibility with existing applications. However, they do not take in consideration the impact of the ontology evolution process on the performance of computational tasks – e.g., in this work we focus on instance tagging, similarity computation, generation of recommendations, and data clustering. In this paper, we propose the Pragmatic Ontology Evolution (POE) framework, a novel approach for selecting from a group of candidates a set of concepts able to produce a new version of a given ontology that i) is consistent with the a set of user requirements (e.g., max number of concepts in the ontology), ii) is parametrised with respect to a number of dimensions (e.g., topological considerations), and iii) effectively supports relevant computational tasks. Our approach also supports users in navigating the space of possible solutions by showing how certain choices, such as limiting the number of concepts or privileging trendy concepts rather than historical ones, would reflect on the application performance. An evaluation of POE on the real-world scenario of the evolving Springer Nature taxonomy for editorial classification yielded excellent results, demonstrating a significant improvement over alternative approaches

Layered change log model: bridging between ontology change representation and pattern mining

To date, no ontology change management system exists that records the ontology changes based on the different levels of granularity. Once changes are performed using elementary level change operations, they are recorded in the database at the elementary level accordingly. Such a change representation procedure is not sufficient to represent the intuition behind any applied change and thus, cannot capture the semantic impact of a change. In this paper, we discuss recording of the applied ontology changes in the form of a layered change log. We support the implementation of a layered change operator framework through layered change logs. We utilize the lower level ontology change log in two ways, i.e. recording of applied ontology changes (operational) and mining of higher level change patterns (analytical). The higher level change logs capture the objective of the ontology changes at a higher level of granularity and support a comprehensive understanding of the ontology evolution. The knowledge-based change log facilitates the detection of similarities within different time series, mining of change patterns and reuse of knowledge.The layered change logs are formalised using a graph-based approach

Ontological Services Using Crowdsourcing

This paper develops a service for ontology evolution based on crowdsourcing. The approach is demonstrated using OntoAssist, a specially designed semantic search service that is capable of capturing and disambiguating user’s search intent as well as automatically enabling ontology evolution. Successful and consistent ontology evolution often requires large amount of input data to specify new terms or changes in relationships. These inputs typically come mainly from domain experts or ontology professionals, which makes it hard to keep up with the change of open, dynamic World Wide Web environment. By integrating OntoAssist with an existing search engine, we show that users’ search intent can be disambiguated and aggregated to help to evolve underlying ontology. The disambiguation feature helps the users to find desirable search results. OntoAssist has been implemented and tested by Turkers from Amazon Mechanical Turk in a live demonstration site. Promising results and analysis are reported