Alignment-based Partitioning of Large-scale Ontologies

Ontology alignment is an important task for information integration systems that can make different resources, described by various and heterogeneous ontologies, interoperate. However very large ontologies have been built in some domains such as medicine or agronomy and the challenge now lays in scaling up alignment techniques that often perform complex tasks. In this paper, we propose two partitioning methods which have been designed to take the alignment objective into account in the partitioning process as soon as possible. These methods transform the two ontologies to be aligned into two sets of blocks of a limited size. Furthermore, the elements of the two ontologies that might be aligned are grouped in a minimal set of blocks and the comparison is then enacted upon these blocks. Results of experiments performed by the two methods on various pairs of ontologies are promising

From Text to Knowledge with Graphs: modelling, querying and exploiting textual content

This paper highlights the challenges, current trends, and open issues related to the representation, querying and analytics of content extracted from texts. The internet contains vast text-based information on various subjects, including commercial documents, medical records, scientific experiments, engineering tests, and events that impact urban and natural environments. Extracting knowledge from this text involves understanding the nuances of natural language and accurately representing the content without losing information. This allows knowledge to be accessed, inferred, or discovered. To achieve this, combining results from various fields, such as linguistics, natural language processing, knowledge representation, data storage, querying, and analytics, is necessary. The vision in this paper is that graphs can be a well-suited text content representation once annotated and the right querying and analytics techniques are applied. This paper discusses this hypothesis from the perspective of linguistics, natural language processing, graph models and databases and artificial intelligence provided by the panellists of the DOING session in the MADICS Symposium 2022

Optimizing Ontology Alignments through NSGA-II without Using Reference Alignment

Ontology is widely used to solve the data heterogeneity problems on the semantic web, but the available ontologies could themselves introduce heterogeneity. In order to reconcile these ontologies to implement the semantic interoperability, we need to find the relationships among the entities in various ontologies, and the process of identifying them is called ontology alignment. In all the existing matching systems that use evolutionary approaches to optimize their parameters, a reference alignment between two ontologies to be aligned should be given in advance which could be very expensive to obtain especially when the scale of ontologies is considerably large. To address this issue, in this paper we propose a novel approach to utilize the NSGA-II to optimize the ontology alignments without using the reference alignment. In our approach, an adaptive aggregation strategy is presented to improve the efficiency of optimizing process and two approximate evaluation measures, namely match coverage and match ratio, are introduced to replace the classic recall and precision on reference alignment to evaluate the quality of the alignments. Experimental results show that our approach is effective and can find the solutions that are very close to those obtained by the approaches using reference alignment, and the quality of alignments is in general better than that of state of the art ontology matching systems such as GOAL and SAMBO

A foundation for ontology modularisation

There has been great interest in realising the Semantic Web. Ontologies are used to define Semantic Web applications. Ontologies have grown to be large and complex to the point where it causes cognitive overload for humans, in understanding and maintaining, and for machines, in processing and reasoning. Furthermore, building ontologies from scratch is time-consuming and not always necessary. Prospective ontology developers could consider using existing ontologies that are of good quality. However, an entire large ontology is not always required for a particular application, but a subset of the knowledge may be relevant. Modularity deals with simplifying an ontology for a particular context or by structure into smaller ontologies, thereby preserving the contextual knowledge. There are a number of benefits in modularising an ontology including simplified maintenance and machine processing, as well as collaborative efforts whereby work can be shared among experts. Modularity has been successfully applied to a number of different ontologies to improve usability and assist with complexity. However, problems exist for modularity that have not been satisfactorily addressed. Currently, modularity tools generate large modules that do not exclusively represent the context. Partitioning tools, which ought to generate disjoint modules, sometimes create overlapping modules. These problems arise from a number of issues: different module types have not been clearly characterised, it is unclear what the properties of a 'good' module are, and it is unclear which evaluation criteria applies to specific module types. In order to successfully solve the problem, a number of theoretical aspects have to be investigated. It is important to determine which ontology module types are the most widely-used and to characterise each such type by distinguishing properties. One must identify properties that a 'good' or 'usable' module meets. In this thesis, we investigate these problems with modularity systematically. We begin by identifying dimensions for modularity to define its foundation: use-case, technique, type, property, and evaluation metric. Each dimension is populated with sub-dimensions as fine-grained values. The dimensions are used to create an empirically-based framework for modularity by classifying a set of ontologies with them, which results in dependencies among the dimensions. The formal framework can be used to guide the user in modularising an ontology and as a starting point in the modularisation process. To solve the problem with module quality, new and existing metrics were implemented into a novel tool TOMM, and an experimental evaluation with a set of modules was performed resulting in dependencies between the metrics and module types. These dependencies can be used to determine whether a module is of good quality. For the issue with existing modularity techniques, we created five new algorithms to improve the current tools and techniques and experimentally evaluate them. The algorithms of the tool, NOMSA, performs as well as other tools for most performance criteria. For NOMSA's generated modules, two of its algorithms' generated modules are good quality when compared to the expected dependencies of the framework. The remaining three algorithms' modules correspond to some of the expected values for the metrics for the ontology set in question. The success of solving the problems with modularity resulted in a formal foundation for modularity which comprises: an exhaustive set of modularity dimensions with dependencies between them, a framework for guiding the modularisation process and annotating module, a way to measure the quality of modules using the novel TOMM tool which has new and existing evaluation metrics, the SUGOI tool for module management that has been investigated for module interchangeability, and an implementation of new algorithms to fill in the gaps of insufficient tools and techniques

MPP-MLO: Multilevel Parallel Partitioning for Efficiently Matching Large Ontologies

221-229The growing usage of Semantic Web has resulted in an increasing number, size and heterogeneity of ontologies on the web. Therefore, the necessity of ontology matching techniques, which could solve these issues, is highly required. Due to high computational requirements, scalability is always a major concern in ontology matching system. In this work, a partition-based ontology matching system is proposed, which deals with parallel partitioning of the ontologies at multilevel. At first level, the root based ontology partitioning is proposed. Match able sub-ontology pair is generated using an efficient linguistic matcher (IEI-Sub) to uncover anchors and then based on maximum similarity values, pairs are generated. However, a distributed and parallel approach of Map Reduce-based IEI-sub process has been proposed to efficiently handle the anchor discovery process which is highly time-consuming. In second level partitioning, an efficient approach is proposed to form non-overlapping clusters. Extensive experimental evaluation is done by comparing existing approaches with the proposed approach, and the results shows that MPP-MLO turns out to be an efficient and scalable ontology matching system with 58.7% reduction in overall execution time

MPP-MLO: Multilevel Parallel Partitioning for Efficiently Matching Large Ontologies

The growing usage of Semantic Web has resulted in an increasing number, size and heterogeneity of ontologies on the web. Therefore, the necessity of ontology matching techniques, which could solve these issues, is highly required. Due to high computational requirements, scalability is always a major concern in ontology matching system. In this work, a partition-based ontology matching system is proposed, which deals with parallel partitioning of the ontologies at multilevel. At first level, the root based ontology partitioning is proposed. Matchable Sub-ontologies pair is generated using an efficient linguistic matcher (IEI-Sub) to uncover anchors and then based on maximum similarity value, pairs are generated. However, a distributed and parallel approach of MapReduce-based SEI-sub process has been proposed to efficiently handle the anchor discovery process which is highly time-consuming. In second level partitioning, an efficient approach is proposed to form non overlapping clusters. Extensive experimental evaluation is done by comparing existing approaches with the proposed approach, and the results shows that MPP-MLO turns out to be an efficient and scalable ontology matching system