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

Completing and Debugging Ontologies: state of the art and challenges

As semantically-enabled applications require high-quality ontologies, developing and maintaining ontologies that are as correct and complete as possible is an important although difficult task in ontology engineering. A key step is ontology debugging and completion. In general, there are two steps: detecting defects and repairing defects. In this paper we discuss the state of the art regarding the repairing step. We do this by formalizing the repairing step as an abduction problem and situating the state of the art with respect to this framework. We show that there are still many open research problems and show opportunities for further work and advancing the field.Comment: 56 page

Hybrid fuzzy multi-objective particle swarm optimization for taxonomy extraction

Ontology learning refers to an automatic extraction of ontology to produce the ontology learning layer cake which consists of five kinds of output: terms, concepts, taxonomy relations, non-taxonomy relations and axioms. Term extraction is a prerequisite for all aspects of ontology learning. It is the automatic mining of complete terms from the input document. Another important part of ontology is taxonomy, or the hierarchy of concepts. It presents a tree view of the ontology and shows the inheritance between subconcepts and superconcepts. In this research, two methods were proposed for improving the performance of the extraction result. The first method uses particle swarm optimization in order to optimize the weights of features. The advantage of particle swarm optimization is that it can calculate and adjust the weight of each feature according to the appropriate value, and here it is used to improve the performance of term and taxonomy extraction. The second method uses a hybrid technique that uses multi-objective particle swarm optimization and fuzzy systems that ensures that the membership functions and fuzzy system rule sets are optimized. The advantage of using a fuzzy system is that the imprecise and uncertain values of feature weights can be tolerated during the extraction process. This method is used to improve the performance of taxonomy extraction. In the term extraction experiment, five extracted features were used for each term from the document. These features were represented by feature vectors consisting of domain relevance, domain consensus, term cohesion, first occurrence and length of noun phrase. For taxonomy extraction, matching Hearst lexico-syntactic patterns in documents and the web, and hypernym information form WordNet were used as the features that represent each pair of terms from the texts. These two proposed methods are evaluated using a dataset that contains documents about tourism. For term extraction, the proposed method is compared with benchmark algorithms such as Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency, Weirdness, Glossary Extraction and Term Extractor, using the precision performance evaluation measurement. For taxonomy extraction, the proposed methods are compared with benchmark methods of Feature-based and weighting by Support Vector Machine using the f-measure, precision and recall performance evaluation measurements. For the first method, the experiment results concluded that implementing particle swarm optimization in order to optimize the feature weights in terms and taxonomy extraction leads to improved accuracy of extraction result compared to the benchmark algorithms. For the second method, the results concluded that the hybrid technique that uses multi-objective particle swarm optimization and fuzzy systems leads to improved performance of taxonomy extraction results when compared to the benchmark methods, while adjusting the fuzzy membership function and keeping the number of fuzzy rules to a minimum number with a high degree of accuracy

Pattern-based design applied to cultural heritage knowledge graphs

Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) have become an established and recognised practice for guaranteeing good quality ontology engineering. There are several ODP repositories where ODPs are shared as well as ontology design methodologies recommending their reuse. Performing rigorous testing is recommended as well for supporting ontology maintenance and validating the resulting resource against its motivating requirements. Nevertheless, it is less than straightforward to find guidelines on how to apply such methodologies for developing domain-specific knowledge graphs. ArCo is the knowledge graph of Italian Cultural Heritage and has been developed by using eXtreme Design (XD), an ODP- and test-driven methodology. During its development, XD has been adapted to the need of the CH domain e.g. gathering requirements from an open, diverse community of consumers, a new ODP has been defined and many have been specialised to address specific CH requirements. This paper presents ArCo and describes how to apply XD to the development and validation of a CH knowledge graph, also detailing the (intellectual) process implemented for matching the encountered modelling problems to ODPs. Relevant contributions also include a novel web tool for supporting unit-testing of knowledge graphs, a rigorous evaluation of ArCo, and a discussion of methodological lessons learned during ArCo development

Uncertainty-sensitive reasoning for inferring sameAs facts in linked data

albakri2016aInternational audienceDiscovering whether or not two URIs described in Linked Data -- in the same or different RDF datasets -- refer to the same real-world entity is crucial for building applications that exploit the cross-referencing of open data. A major challenge in data interlinking is to design tools that effectively deal with incomplete and noisy data, and exploit uncertain knowledge. In this paper, we model data interlinking as a reasoning problem with uncertainty. We introduce a probabilistic framework for modelling and reasoning over uncertain RDF facts and rules that is based on the semantics of probabilistic Datalog. We have designed an algorithm, ProbFR, based on this framework. Experiments on real-world datasets have shown the usefulness and effectiveness of our approach for data linkage and disambiguation

Exploiting general-purpose background knowledge for automated schema matching

The schema matching task is an integral part of the data integration process. It is usually the first step in integrating data. Schema matching is typically very complex and time-consuming. It is, therefore, to the largest part, carried out by humans. One reason for the low amount of automation is the fact that schemas are often defined with deep background knowledge that is not itself present within the schemas. Overcoming the problem of missing background knowledge is a core challenge in automating the data integration process. In this dissertation, the task of matching semantic models, so-called ontologies, with the help of external background knowledge is investigated in-depth in Part I. Throughout this thesis, the focus lies on large, general-purpose resources since domain-specific resources are rarely available for most domains. Besides new knowledge resources, this thesis also explores new strategies to exploit such resources. A technical base for the development and comparison of matching systems is presented in Part II. The framework introduced here allows for simple and modularized matcher development (with background knowledge sources) and for extensive evaluations of matching systems. One of the largest structured sources for general-purpose background knowledge are knowledge graphs which have grown significantly in size in recent years. However, exploiting such graphs is not trivial. In Part III, knowledge graph em- beddings are explored, analyzed, and compared. Multiple improvements to existing approaches are presented. In Part IV, numerous concrete matching systems which exploit general-purpose background knowledge are presented. Furthermore, exploitation strategies and resources are analyzed and compared. This dissertation closes with a perspective on real-world applications

AgroPortal: a vocabulary and ontology repository for agronomy

Many vocabularies and ontologies are produced to represent and annotate agronomic data. However, those ontologies are spread out, in different formats, of different size, with different structures and from overlapping domains. Therefore, there is need for a common platform to receive and host them, align them, and enabling their use in agro-informatics applications. By reusing the National Center for Biomedical Ontologies (NCBO) BioPortal technology, we have designed AgroPortal, an ontology repository for the agronomy domain. The AgroPortal project re-uses the biomedical domain’s semantic tools and insights to serve agronomy, but also food, plant, and biodiversity sciences. We offer a portal that features ontology hosting, search, versioning, visualization, comment, and recommendation; enables semantic annotation; stores and exploits ontology alignments; and enables interoperation with the semantic web. The AgroPortal specifically satisfies requirements of the agronomy community in terms of ontology formats (e.g., SKOS vocabularies and trait dictionaries) and supported features (offering detailed metadata and advanced annotation capabilities). In this paper, we present our platform’s content and features, including the additions to the original technology, as well as preliminary outputs of five driving agronomic use cases that participated in the design and orientation of the project to anchor it in the community. By building on the experience and existing technology acquired from the biomedical domain, we can present in AgroPortal a robust and feature-rich repository of great value for the agronomic domain. Keyword