An Approach to Cope with Ontology Changes for Ontology-based Applications

Keeping track of ontology changes is becoming a critical issue for ontology-based applications because updating an ontology that is in use may result in inconsistencies between the ontology and the knowledge base, dependent ontologies and dependent applications/services. Current research concentrates on the creation of ontologies and how to manage ontology changes in terms of the attempts to ease the communications between ontology versions and keep consistent with the instances, and there is little work available on controlling the impact to dependent applications/services which is the aims of the system presented in this paper. The approach we propose in this paper is to manually capture and log ontology changes, use this log to analyse incoming RDQL queries and amend them as necessary. Revised queries can then be used to query the knowledge base of the applications/services. We present the infrastructure of our approach based on the problems and scenarios identified within ontology-based systems. We discuss the issues met during our design and implementation, and consider some problems whose solutions will be beneficial to the development of our approach

Winnowing ontologies based on application use

The requirements of specific applications and services are often over estimated when ontologies are reused or built. This sometimes results in many ontologies being too large for their intended purposes. It is not uncommon that when applications and services are deployed over an ontology, only a few parts of the ontology are queried and used. Identifying which parts of an ontology are being used could be helpful to winnow the ontology, i.e., simplify or shrink the ontology to smaller, more fit for purpose size. Some approaches to handle this problem have already been suggested in the literature. However, none of that work showed how ontology-based applications can be used in the ontology-resizing process, or how they might be affected by it. This paper presents a study on the use of the AKT Reference Ontology by a number of applications and services,and investigates the possibility of relying on this usage information to winnow that ontology

Ontology Winnowing: A Case Study on the AKT Reference Ontology

Many ontologies are built for the main purpose of representing a domain, rather than to meet the requirements of a specific application. When applications and services are deployed over an ontology, it is sometimes the case that only few parts of the ontology are queried and used. Identifying which parts of an ontology are being used could useful for realising the necessary fragments of the ontology to run the applications. Such information could be used to winnow an ontology, i.e., simplifying or shrinking the ontology to smaller, more fit for purpose sizes. This paper presents a study on the use of the AKT Reference Ontology by a number of applications and services, and investigate the possibility of using this information to winnow that ontology

Conceptual modelling and the quality of ontologies: A comparison between object-role modelling and the object paradigm

Ontologies are key enablers for sharing precise and machine-understandable semantics among different applications and parties. Yet, for ontologies to meet these expectations, their quality must be of a good standard. The quality of an ontology is strongly based on the design method employed. This paper addresses the design problems related to the modelling of ontologies, with specific concentration on the issues related to the quality of the conceptualisations produced. The paper aims to demonstrate the impact of the modelling paradigm adopted on the quality of ontological models and, consequently, the potential impact that such a decision can have in relation to the development of software applications. To this aim, an ontology that is conceptualised based on the Object Role Modelling (ORM) approach is re-engineered into a one modelled on the basis of the Object Paradigm (OP). Next, the two ontologies are analytically compared using the specified criteria. The conducted comparison highlights that using the OP for ontology conceptualisation can provide more expressive, reusable, objective and temporal ontologies than those conceptualised on the basis of the ORM approach

Ontology-based metrics computation for business process analysis

Business Process Management (BPM) aims to support the whole life-cycle necessary to deploy and maintain business processes in organisations. Crucial within the BPM lifecycle is the analysis of deployed processes. Analysing business processes requires computing metrics that can help determining the health of business activities and thus the whole enterprise. However, the degree of automation currently achieved cannot support the level of reactivity and adaptation demanded by businesses. In this paper we argue and show how the use of Semantic Web technologies can increase to an important extent the level of automation for analysing business processes. We present a domain-independent ontological framework for Business Process Analysis (BPA) with support for automatically computing metrics. In particular, we define a set of ontologies for specifying metrics. We describe a domain-independent metrics computation engine that can interpret and compute them. Finally we illustrate and evaluate our approach with a set of general purpose metrics

A plant disease extension of the Infectious Disease Ontology

Plants from a handful of species provide the primary source of food for all people, yet this source is vulnerable to multiple stressors, such as disease, drought, and nutrient deficiency. With rapid population growth and climate uncertainty, the need to produce crops that can tolerate or resist plant stressors is more crucial than ever. Traditional plant breeding methods may not be sufficient to overcome this challenge, and methods such as highOthroughput sequencing and automated scoring of phenotypes can provide significant new insights. Ontologies are essential tools for accessing and analysing the large quantities of data that come with these newer methods. As part of a larger project to develop ontologies that describe plant phenotypes and stresses, we are developing a plant disease extension of the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDOPlant). The IDOPlant is envisioned as a reference ontology designed to cover any plant infectious disease. In addition to novel terms for infectious diseases, IDOPlant includes terms imported from other ontologies that describe plants, pathogens, and vectors, the geographic location and ecology of diseases and hosts, and molecular functions and interactions of hosts and pathogens. To encompass this range of data, we are suggesting inOhouse ontology development complemented with reuse of terms from orthogonal ontologies developed as part of the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry. The study of plant diseases provides an example of how an ontological framework can be used to model complex biological phenomena such as plant disease, and how plant infectious diseases differ from, and are similar to, infectious diseases in other organism

Identifying communities of practice: analysing ontologies as networks to support community recognition

Communities of practice are seen as increasingly important for creating, sharing and applying organisational knowledge. Yet their informal nature makes them difficult to identify and manage. In this paper we set out ONTOCOPI, a system that applies ontology-based network analysis techniques to target the problem of identifying such communities

Towards Knowledge-Intensive Software Engineering

Postprin

Ontological Foundations for Scholarly Debate Mapping Technology

Mapping scholarly debates is an important genre of what can be called Knowledge Domain Analytics (KDA) technology – i.e. technology which combines both quantitative and qualitative methods of analysing specialist knowledge domains. However, current KDA technology research has emerged from diverse traditions and thus lacks a common conceptual foundation. This paper reports on the design of a KDA ontology that aims to provide this foundation. The paper then describes the argumentation extensions to the ontology for supporting scholarly debate mapping as a special form of KDA and demonstrates its expressive capabilities using a case study debate