Facets, Tiers and Gems: Ontology Patterns for Hypernormalisation

There are many methodologies and techniques for easing the task of ontology building. Here we describe the intersection of two of these: ontology normalisation and fully programmatic ontology development. The first of these describes a standardized organisation for an ontology, with singly inherited self-standing entities, and a number of small taxonomies of refining entities. The former are described and defined in terms of the latter and used to manage the polyhierarchy of the self-standing entities. Fully programmatic development is a technique where an ontology is developed using a domain-specific language within a programming language, meaning that as well defining ontological entities, it is possible to add arbitrary patterns or new syntax within the same environment. We describe how new patterns can be used to enable a new style of ontology development that we call hypernormalisation

The integration of OntoClean in WebODE

Enterprises will only be interested in the use of ontologies if such ontologies are evaluated enough. Therefore, the development of ontology evaluation tools is a crucial matter. We have built the ODEClean module in the workbench for building ontologies named WebODE. ODEClean allows cleaning taxonomies following the OntoClean method, and WebODE provides technical support to the Methontology methodology for building ontologies. We approached the development of this module in two steps. Firstly, we have integrated the OntoClean method into the conceptualisation activity of Methontology. Secondly, we have designed and implemented ODEClean using a declarative approach for specifying the knowledge to be used on the evaluation. ODEClean uses: (a) the Top Level of Universals, (b) metaproperties based on philosophical notions, and (c) OntoClean evaluation axioms. The main advantage of this approach is that the system could easily allow the user relax or stress the evaluation of the taxonomy just selecting more or less meta-properties

Endurant Types in Ontology-Driven Conceptual Modeling: Towards OntoUML 2.0

For over a decade now, a community of researchers has contributed to the development of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) - aimed at providing foundations for all major conceptual modeling constructs. This ontology has led to the development of an Ontology-Driven Conceptual Modeling language dubbed OntoUML, reflecting the ontological micro-theories comprising UFO. Over the years, UFO and OntoUML have been successfully employed in a number of academic, industrial and governmental settings to create conceptual models in a variety of different domains. These experiences have pointed out to opportunities of improvement not only to the language itself but also to its underlying theory. In this paper, we take the first step in that direction by revising the theory of types in UFO in response to empirical evidence. The new version of this theory shows that many of the meta-types present in OntoUML (differentiating Kinds, Roles, Phases, Mixins, etc.) should be considered not as restricted to Substantial types but instead should be applied to model Endurant Types in general, including Relator types, Quality types and Mode types. We also contribute a formal characterization of this fragment of the theory, which is then used to advance a metamodel for OntoUML 2.0. Finally, we propose a computational support tool implementing this updated metamodel

Ontology as Product-Service System: Lessons Learned from GO, BFO and DOLCE

This paper defends a view of the Gene Ontology (GO) and of Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as examples of what the manufacturing industry calls product-service systems. This means that they are products (the ontologies) bundled with a range of ontology services such as updates, training, help desk, and permanent identifiers. The paper argues that GO and BFO are contrasted in this respect with DOLCE, which approximates more closely to a scientific theory or a scientific publication. The paper provides a detailed overview of ontology services and concludes with a discussion of some implications of the product-service system approach for the understanding of the nature of applied ontology. Ontology developer communities are compared in this respect with developers of scientific theories and of standards (such as W3C). For each of these we can ask: what kinds of products do they develop and what kinds of services do they provide for the users of these products

Ontology selection: ontology evaluation on the real Semantic Web

The increasing number of ontologies on the Web and the appearance of large scale ontology repositories has brought the topic of ontology selection in the focus of the semantic web research agenda. Our view is that ontology evaluation is core to ontology selection and that, because ontology selection is performed in an open Web environment, it brings new challenges to ontology evaluation. Unfortunately, current research regards ontology selection and evaluation as two separate topics. Our goal in this paper is to explore how these two tasks relate. In particular, we are interested to get a better understanding of the ontology selection task and filter out the challenges that it brings to ontology evaluation. We discuss requirements posed by the open Web environment on ontology selection, we overview existing work on selection and point out future directions. Our major conclusion is that, even if selection methods still need further development, they have already brought novel approaches to ontology evaluatio