Foundational Ontologies meet Ontology Matching: A Survey

Ontology matching is a research area aimed at finding ways to make different ontologies interoperable. Solutions to the problem have been proposed from different disciplines, including databases, natural language processing, and machine learning. The role of foundational ontologies for ontology matching is an important one. It is multifaceted and with room for development. This paper presents an overview of the different tasks involved in ontology matching that consider foundational ontologies. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of existing proposals and highlight the challenges to be addressed in the future

linguistic and conceptual aspects

UIDB/03213/2020 UIDP/03213/2020This paper describes work carried out for the OntoAndalus project at NOVA CLUNL. This project aims at establishing the foundations for a terminological knowledge base (TKB) on Islamic archaeology. The main part of the work carried out so far is the development of an ontology of artefact types in al-Andalusian pottery studies, which was done by reusing the DOLCE+DnS Ultralite foundational ontology. Subsequently, Portuguese and Spanish terms for artefact types were extracted from a corpus of specialised texts and represented by means of lexical networks. The Lexicon Model for Ontologies (Lemon), recently developed by a W3C Community Group, was put forward as a promising framework for integrating language-specific and language-independent information in a future TKB on the domain. The possibility of aligning OntoAndalus with Lemon is also discussed in this paper.publishersversionpublishe

A Pattern-Based Core Ontology for Product Lifecycle Management based on DUL

A major challenge in Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is the exchange of product data across lifecycle phases, information systems, and parties as data formats, structure and quality can vary vastly. Existing approaches focus only on certain phases of PLM, predominantly design and manufacturing, while the subsequent phases of usage/maintenance and disposal are often ignored. However, especially the usage phase is becoming increasingly important for revenue as customer expectation for services beyond the initial purchase of a product is growing. This paper proposes an ontology CO-PLM based on the foundational ontology DOLCE+DnS Ultralite to provide a formal basis for PLM. In contrast to existing approaches, CO-PLM follows an holistic approach covering all phases of PLM and integrates patterns from existing core ontologies

an ontology of Islamic artefacts for terminological purposes

UID/LIN/03213/2019OntoAndalus aims at constituting a shared conceptualisation of the domain within a future multilingual terminological resource targeted at experts and students of Islamic archaeology. The present version of OntoAndalus is aligned with DOLCE+DnS Ultralite (DUL), an established top-level ontology for the Semantic Web. This article describes the modelling assumptions underlying OntoAndalus, as well as the more relevant design patterns (i.e. artefact types, events and individuals). The latter are exemplified through relevant case studies in the domain, namely those of lighting artefacts, the life cycle of pottery and the several descriptions of Vaso de Tavira.authorsversionepub_ahead_of_prin

an ontology of Islamic artefacts for terminological purposes

UID/LIN/03213/2019OntoAndalus aims at constituting a shared conceptualisation of the domain within a future multilingual terminological resource targeted at experts and students of Islamic archaeology. The present version of OntoAndalus is aligned with DOLCE+DnS Ultralite (DUL), an established top-level ontology for the Semantic Web. This article describes the modelling assumptions underlying OntoAndalus, as well as the more relevant design patterns (i.e. artefact types, events and individuals). The latter are exemplified through relevant case studies in the domain, namely those of lighting artefacts, the life cycle of pottery and the several descriptions of Vaso de Tavira.authorsversionpublishe

extraction and representation of Portuguese and Spanish terms in the archaeology of al-Andalus

UID/LIN/03213/2019Cet article se concentre sur les termes des artefacts d’éclairage dans un corpus sur l’archéologie d’al-Andalus. Le but de ce travail est la création d’une ressource terminologique multilingue basée sur une ontologie. La connaissance du domaine est représentée par OntoAndalus, une ontologie OWL qui repose sur DOLCE + DnS Ultralite. Les informations spécifiques à la langue sont représentées par le modèle Lemon, le Modèle lexical pour les ontologies, lequel est en cours de développement par le W3C. Lemon permet la représentation d’informations grammaticales et sémantiques, notamment les relations lexicosémantiques entre les termes et sa référence aux éléments ontologiques dans OntoAndalus.publishersversionpublishe

ICON: an Ontology for Comprehensive Artistic Interpretations

In this work, we introduce ICON, an ontology that models artistic interpretations of artworks’ subject matter (i.e. iconographies) and meanings (i.e. symbols, iconological aspects). Developed by conceptualizing authoritative knowledge and notions taken from Panofsky’s levels of interpretation theory, ICON ontology focuses on the granularity of interpretations. It can be used to describe an interpretation of an artwork from the Pre-iconographical, Icongraphical, and Iconological levels. Its main classes have been aligned to ontologies that come from the domains of cultural descriptions (ArCo, CIDOC-CRM, VIR), semiotics (DOLCE), bibliometrics (CITO), and symbolism (Simulation Ontology), to grant a robust schema that can be extendable using additional classes and properties coming from these ontologies. The ontology was evaluated through competency questions that range from simple recognition on a specific level of interpretation to complex scenarios. Data written using this model was compared to state-of-the-art ontologies and schemas to both highlight the current lack of a domain-specific ontology on art interpretation and show how our work fills some of the current gaps. The ontology is openly available and compliant with FAIR principles. With our ontology, we hope to encourage digital art historians working for cultural institutions in making more detailed linked open data about the content of their artefacts, to exploit the full potential of Semantic Web in linking artworks through not only subjects and common metadata, but also specific symbolic interpretations, intrinsic meanings, and the motifs through which their subjects are represented. Additionally, by basing our work on theories made by different art history scholars in the last century, we make sure that their knowledge and studies will not be lost in the transition to the digital, linked open data era

Towards a Digital Earth: Using Archetypes to Enable Knowledge Interoperability within Geo-Observational Sensor Systems Design

Earth System Science (ESS) observational data are often inadequately semantically enriched by geo-observational information systems in order to capture the true meaning of the associated data sets. Data models underpinning these information systems are often too rigid in their data representation to allow for the ever-changing and evolving nature of ESS domain concepts. This impoverished approach to observational data representation reduces the ability of multi-disciplinary practitioners to share information in a computable way. Object oriented techniques typically employed to model data in a complex domain (with evolving domain concepts) can unnecessarily exclude domain specialists from the design process, invariably leading to a mismatch between the needs of the domain specialists, and how the concepts are modelled. In many cases, an over simplification of the domain concept is captured by the computer scientist. This paper proposes that two-level modelling methodologies developed by Health Informaticians to tackle similar problems of specific domain use-case knowledge modelling can be re-used within ESS Informatics. A proposed methodology to re-use two-level modelling within geo-observational sensor systems is described. We show how the Open Geospatial Consortium’s (OGC) Observations & Measurements (O&M) standard can act as a pragmatic solution for a stable reference-model (necessary for two-level modelling), and upon which more volatile domain specific concepts can be defined and managed using archetypes. A use-case is presented, followed by a worked example showing the implementation methodology and considerations leading to an O&M based, two-level modelling design approach, to realise semantically rich and interoperable Earth System Science based geo-observational sensor systems

Curate and storyspace: an ontology and web-based environment for describing curatorial narratives

Existing metadata schemes and content management systems used by museums focus on describing the heritage objects that the museum holds in its collection. These are used to manage and describe individual heritage objects according to properties such as artist, date and preservation requirements. Curatorial narratives, such as physical or online exhibitions tell a story that spans across heritage objects and have a meaning that does not necessarily reside in the individual heritage objects themselves. Here we present curate, an ontology for describing curatorial narratives. This draws on structuralist accounts that distinguish the narrative from the story and plot, and also a detailed analysis of two museum exhibitions and the curatorial processes that contributed to them. Storyspace, our web based interface and API to the ontology, is being used by curatorial staff in two museums to model curatorial narratives and the processes through which they are constructed