Network of Ontologies – A Systematic Mapping Study and Challenges Comparison

Background: Network of ontologies is the pairwise match of a set of ontologies, which became recently relevant due to its applicability in different domains, such as cultural evolution. However, the challenges faced in this area are not completely known and understood, neither are their relations to ontology matching counterpart problems . Aims: The goal of this paper is to identify challenges and applications of a network of ontologies and compare them to the 8 existing challenges of ontology matching [8]. Research questions are: (i) Which are the challenges for a Network of Ontologies? (ii) What are the applications of a Network of Ontologies? Method: We defined and executed a systematic mapping review protocol. A specialist on systematic mapping review and ontology research evaluated protocol and results. Results: Out of the 67 relevant studies, 10 addressed the research questions. All of them presented challenges, but only four presented applications. Conclusions: We identified four new challenges and related them with the eight challenges presented in [8]

Open biomedical pluralism : formalising knowledge about breast cancer phenotypes

We demonstrate a heterogeneity of representation types for breast cancer phenotypes and stress that the characterisation of a tumour phenotype often includes parameters that go beyond the representation of a corresponding empirically observed tumour, thus reflecting significant functional features of the phenotypes as well as epistemic interests that drive the modes of representation. Accordingly, the represented features of cancer phenotypes function as epistemic vehicles aiding various classifications, explanations, and predictions. In order to clarify how the plurality of epistemic motivations can be integrated on a formal level, we give a distinction between six categories of human agents as individuals and groups focused around particular epistemic interests. We analyse the corresponding impact of these groups and individuals on representation types, mapping and reasoning scenarios. Respecting the plurality of representations, related formalisms, expressivities and aims, as they are found across diverse scientific communities, we argue for a pluralistic ontology integration. Moreover, we discuss and illustrate to what extent such a pluralistic integration is supported by the distributed ontology language DOL, a meta-language for heterogeneous ontology representation that is currently under standardisation as ISO WD 17347 within the OntoIOp (Ontology Integration and Interoperability) activity of ISO/TC 37/SC 3. We particularly illustrate how DOL supports representations of parthood on various levels of logical expressivity, mapping of terms, merging of ontologies, as well as non-monotonic extensions based on circumscription allowing a transparent formal modelling of the normal/abnormal distinction in phenotypes

ḤADĪṮ e analisi computazionale.Strategie e strumenti per il trattamento automatico del testo arabo e l’estrazione d’informazione

The dissertation explored new textual approaches to the Hadiths collections belonging to the juridical Islamic tradition, by drafting and implementing original computational and Natural Language Processing-based strategie

Chinese whispers and connected alignments

This paper investigates the idea to treat repositories of ontologies as interlinked networks of ontologies, formally captured by the notion of a hyperontology. We apply standard matching algorithms to automatically create the linkage structure of the repository by performing pairwise matching. Subsequently, we define a modular work-flow to construct combinations of alignments for any finite number of ontologies. This workflow employs and makes interoperable several tools from the ontology engineering world, comprising matching, reasoning, and structuring tools, and supports in particular modular ontology extraction based on alignment, and a study and empirical analysis of (in)consistency propagation in connected alignments (the Chinese Whispers problem)