Methodology for The Development of an Ontology Network on The Brazilian National System for the Evaluation of higher Education (OntoSINAES)

Ontologies occupy a central position in any conceptual model of the Semantic Web, aiming fundamentally to add explicit semantics to the contents available in the Web. In the domain of Brazilian higher education, especially with regard to the National System for the Evaluation of Higher Education (SINAES), still lacks a reference ontology that can provide a basic conceptualization common to the different stakeholders of the domain. In this work we discuss the role of an ontology network developed with the purpose of improving the quality of the data produced by the different actors, institutions and systems within the domain of SINAES, in addition to facilitating their publication as open and connected data. In particular, we highlight the importance of the NeOn methodology to be followed during the development of an ontology network, demonstrating its role in defining the life cycle and in the articulation of the various processes and activities in the OntoSINAES ontological network development process

Knowledge formalization in experience feedback processes : an ontology-based approach

Because of the current trend of integration and interoperability of industrial systems, their size and complexity continue to grow making it more difficult to analyze, to understand and to solve the problems that happen in their organizations. Continuous improvement methodologies are powerful tools in order to understand and to solve problems, to control the effects of changes and finally to capitalize knowledge about changes and improvements. These tools involve suitably represent knowledge relating to the concerned system. Consequently, knowledge management (KM) is an increasingly important source of competitive advantage for organizations. Particularly, the capitalization and sharing of knowledge resulting from experience feedback are elements which play an essential role in the continuous improvement of industrial activities. In this paper, the contribution deals with semantic interoperability and relates to the structuring and the formalization of an experience feedback (EF) process aiming at transforming information or understanding gained by experience into explicit knowledge. The reuse of such knowledge has proved to have significant impact on achieving themissions of companies. However, the means of describing the knowledge objects of an experience generally remain informal. Based on an experience feedback process model and conceptual graphs, this paper takes domain ontology as a framework for the clarification of explicit knowledge and know-how, the aim of which is to get lessons learned descriptions that are significant, correct and applicable

An unsupervised approach to disjointness learning based on terminological cluster trees

In the context of the Semantic Web regarded as a Web of Data, research efforts have been devoted to improving the quality of the ontologies that are used as vocabularies to enable complex services based on automated reasoning. From various surveys it emerges that many domains would require better ontologies that include non-negligible constraints for properly conveying the intended semantics. In this respect, disjointness axioms are representative of this general problem: these axioms are essential for making the negative knowledge about the domain of interest explicit yet they are often overlooked during the modeling process (thus affecting the efficacy of the reasoning services). To tackle this problem, automated methods for discovering these axioms can be used as a tool for supporting knowledge engineers in modeling new ontologies or evolving existing ones. The current solutions, either based on statistical correlations or relying on external corpora, often do not fully exploit the terminology. Stemming from this consideration, we have been investigating on alternative methods to elicit disjointness axioms from existing ontologies based on the induction of terminological cluster trees, which are logic trees in which each node stands for a cluster of individuals which emerges as a sub-concept. The growth of such trees relies on a divide-and-conquer procedure that assigns, for the cluster representing the root node, one of the concept descriptions generated via a refinement operator and selected according to a heuristic based on the minimization of the risk of overlap between the candidate sub-clusters (quantified in terms of the distance between two prototypical individuals). Preliminary works have showed some shortcomings that are tackled in this paper. To tackle the task of disjointness axioms discovery we have extended the terminological cluster tree induction framework with various contributions: 1) the adoption of different distance measures for clustering the individuals of a knowledge base; 2) the adoption of different heuristics for selecting the most promising concept descriptions; 3) a modified version of the refinement operator to prevent the introduction of inconsistency during the elicitation of the new axioms. A wide empirical evaluation showed the feasibility of the proposed extensions and the improvement with respect to alternative approaches

Approximate Assertional Reasoning Over Expressive Ontologies

In this thesis, approximate reasoning methods for scalable assertional reasoning are provided whose computational properties can be established in a well-understood way, namely in terms of soundness and completeness, and whose quality can be analyzed in terms of statistical measurements, namely recall and precision. The basic idea of these approximate reasoning methods is to speed up reasoning by trading off the quality of reasoning results against increased speed

An Introduction to Ontologies and Ontology Engineering

In the last decades, the use of ontologies in information systems has become more and more popular in various fields, such as web technologies, database integration, multi agent systems, natural language processing, etc. Artificial intelligent researchers have initially borrowed the word “ontology” from Philosophy, then the word spread in many scientific domain and ontologies are now used in several developments. The main goal of this chapter is to answer generic questions about ontologies, such as: Which are the different kinds of ontologies? What is the purpose of the use of ontologies in an application? Which methods can I use to build an ontology

A survey on the use of relevance feedback for information access systems

Users of online search engines often find it difficult to express their need for information in the form of a query. However, if the user can identify examples of the kind of documents they require then they can employ a technique known as relevance feedback. Relevance feedback covers a range of techniques intended to improve a user's query and facilitate retrieval of information relevant to a user's information need. In this paper we survey relevance feedback techniques. We study both automatic techniques, in which the system modifies the user's query, and interactive techniques, in which the user has control over query modification. We also consider specific interfaces to relevance feedback systems and characteristics of searchers that can affect the use and success of relevance feedback systems

Neuere Entwicklungen der deklarativen KI-Programmierung : proceedings

The field of declarative AI programming is briefly characterized. Its recent developments in Germany are reflected by a workshop as part of the scientific congress KI-93 at the Berlin Humboldt University. Three tutorials introduce to the state of the art in deductive databases, the programming language Gödel, and the evolution of knowledge bases. Eleven contributed papers treat knowledge revision/program transformation, types, constraints, and type-constraint combinations

Ontology matching: state of the art and future challenges

shvaiko2013aInternational audienceAfter years of research on ontology matching, it is reasonable to consider several questions: is the field of ontology matching still making progress? Is this progress significant enough to pursue some further research? If so, what are the particularly promising directions? To answer these questions, we review the state of the art of ontology matching and analyze the results of recent ontology matching evaluations. These results show a measurable improvement in the field, the speed of which is albeit slowing down. We conjecture that significant improvements can be obtained only by addressing important challenges for ontology matching. We present such challenges with insights on how to approach them, thereby aiming to direct research into the most promising tracks and to facilitate the progress of the field