Essentials In Ontology Engineering: Methodologies, Languages, And Tools

In the beginning of the 90s, ontology development was similar to an art: ontology developers did not have clear guidelines on how to build ontologies but only some design criteria to be followed. Work on principles, methods and methodologies, together with supporting technologies and languages, made ontology development become an engineering discipline, the so-called Ontology Engineering. Ontology Engineering refers to the set of activities that concern the ontology development process and the ontology life cycle, the methods and methodologies for building ontologies, and the tool suites and languages that support them. Thanks to the work done in the Ontology Engineering field, the development of ontologies within and between teams has increased and improved, as well as the possibility of reusing ontologies in other developments and in final applications. Currently, ontologies are widely used in (a) Knowledge Engineering, Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, (b) applications related to knowledge management, natural language processing, e-commerce, intelligent information integration, information retrieval, database design and integration, bio-informatics, education, and (c) the Semantic Web, the Semantic Grid, and the Linked Data initiative. In this paper, we provide an overview of Ontology Engineering, mentioning the most outstanding and used methodologies, languages, and tools for building ontologies. In addition, we include some words on how all these elements can be used in the Linked Data initiative

A framework for deriving semantic web services

Web service-based development represents an emerging approach for the development of distributed information systems. Web services have been mainly applied by software practitioners as a means to modularize system functionality that can be offered across a network (e.g., intranet and/or the Internet). Although web services have been predominantly developed as a technical solution for integrating software systems, there is a more business-oriented aspect that developers and enterprises need to deal with in order to benefit from the full potential of web services in an electronic market. This ‘ignored’ aspect is the representation of the semantics underlying the services themselves as well as the ‘things’ that the services manage. Currently languages like the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) provide the syntactic means to describe web services, but lack in providing a semantic underpinning. In order to harvest all the benefits of web services technology, a framework has been developed for deriving business semantics from syntactic descriptions of web services. The benefits of such a framework are two-fold. Firstly, the framework provides a way to gradually construct domain ontologies from previously defined technical services. Secondly, the framework enables the migration of syntactically defined web services toward semantic web services. The study follows a design research approach which (1) identifies the problem area and its relevance from an industrial case study and previous research, (2) develops the framework as a design artifact and (3) evaluates the application of the framework through a relevant scenario

Benefits and challenges of applying Semantic Web Services in the e-Government domain

Joining up services in e-Government usually implies governmental agencies acting in concert without a central control regime. This requires the sharing of scattered and heterogeneous data. Semantic Web Service (SWS) technology can help to integrate, mediate and reason between these datasets. However, since few real-world applications have been developed, it is still unclear which are the actual benefits and issues of adopting such a technology in the e-Government domain. In this paper, we contribute to raising awareness of the potential benefits in the e-Government community by analyzing motivations, requirements, and expected results, before proposing a reusable SWS-based framework. We demonstrate the application of this framework by a compelling use case: a GIS-based emergency planning system. We illustrate the obtained benefits and the key challenges which remain to be addressed

An ontology roadmap for crowdsourcing innovation intermediaries

Ontologies have proliferated in the last years, essentially justified by the need of achieving a consensus in the multiple representations of reality inside computers, and therefore the accomplishment of interoperability between machines and systems. Ontologies provide an explicit conceptualization that describes the semantics of the data. Crowdsourcing innovation intermediaries are organizations that mediate the communication and relationship between companies that aspire to solve some problem or to take advantage of any business opportunity with a crowd that is prone to give ideas based on their knowledge, experience and wisdom, taking advantage of web 2.0 tools. Various ontologies have emerged, but at the best of our knowledge, there isn’t any ontology that represents the entire process of intermediation of crowdsourcing innovation. In this paper we present an ontology roadmap for developing crowdsourcing innovation ontology of the intermediation process. Over the years, several authors have proposed some distinct methodologies, by different proposals of combining practices, activities, languages, according to the project they were involved in. We start making a literature review on ontology building, and analyse and compare ontologies that propose the development from scratch with the ones that propose reusing other ontologies. We also review enterprise and innovation ontologies known in literature. Finally, are presented the criteria for selecting the methodology and the roadmap for building crowdsourcing innovation intermediary ontology.(undefined

INTEROP deliverable DTG 6.2 : Method repository

This deliverable presents the INTEROP method chunks repository (MCR), its architecture and provided services. It includes the definition of a reusable method chunk, its structure, illustrated with examples of method chunks stored in the repository and guidelines for method chunks definition and characterisation covering tasks TG6.2 and TG6.3 of the work plan of the task group. The main result is the definition of the structure of the method chunk repository emphasizing the link to interoperability. Interoperability is a first-class concept in the structure of the method chunk repository. It not only characterizes method chunks, i.e. procedures to solve interoperability problems, but also interoperability cases, i.e. the presentation of actual problems involving interoperability issues. TG 6 has produced three MCR prototypes. Two experiments were undertaken using the Metis system and one using ConceptBase. The task group attended a two-day intense workshop on Metis. As a result, two experiments with Metis as platform for the method chunk repository are under way and reported in this deliverable. One is realizing the structure of the MCR as specified in this report. The other is an alternative approach that serves as a benchmark and is reported in the appendix. The ConceptBase prototype utilizes the metamodel presented in this deliverable. We have analysed three cases involving various aspects of interoperability. One case is about establishing a broker platform for insurance agents, the second about linking the information systems in the public utility sector, and the third case is establishing the relation of the ATHENA Model-Driven Interoperability Framework to the goals of the MCR. The results of the TG6 have been published at the ISD conference 2006 and the ER conference 2006. Copies of the papers are included in the appendix. The report of the example session with the method chunk repository has been shifted towards deliverable TG6.3 (Tutorial of the MCR). This is the more logical place. We want to emphasize that TG6 was not only busy in drafting concepts, exploring the state of the art, and analyzing cases. We are actually experimenting with a prototype and consider this a valuable contribution to the network. As soon as the prototype is stable, knowledge about interoperability solutions can be coded in this repository and can guide designers of interoperable systems by experience knowledge

Semantic Model Alignment for Business Process Integration

Business process models describe an enterprise’s way of conducting business and in this form the basis for shaping the organization and engineering the appropriate supporting or even enabling IT. Thereby, a major task in working with models is their analysis and comparison for the purpose of aligning them. As models can differ semantically not only concerning the modeling languages used, but even more so in the way in which the natural language for labeling the model elements has been applied, the correct identification of the intended meaning of a legacy model is a non-trivial task that thus far has only been solved by humans. In particular at the time of reorganizations, the set-up of B2B-collaborations or mergers and acquisitions the semantic analysis of models of different origin that need to be consolidated is a manual effort that is not only tedious and error-prone but also time consuming and costly and often even repetitive. For facilitating automation of this task by means of IT, in this thesis the new method of Semantic Model Alignment is presented. Its application enables to extract and formalize the semantics of models for relating them based on the modeling language used and determining similarities based on the natural language used in model element labels. The resulting alignment supports model-based semantic business process integration. The research conducted is based on a design-science oriented approach and the method developed has been created together with all its enabling artifacts. These results have been published as the research progressed and are presented here in this thesis based on a selection of peer reviewed publications comprehensively describing the various aspects

Complaint Ontology Pattern - COP

In this paper we present an ontology design pattern to conceptualize complaints - an important domain still uncovered by ODPs. The proposed Complaint Ontology Pattern (COP) has been designed based on the analysis of free text complaints from available complaint datasets (banking, air transport, automobile) among other knowledge sources. We present a detailed use case from consumer disputes. We evaluate the pattern by annotating the complaints from our use case and by discussing how COP aligns to existing ontologies

Methodologies, tools and languages for building ontologies. Where is their meeting point?

In this paper we review and compare the main methodologies, tools and languages for building ontologies that have been reported in the literature, as well as the main relationships among them. Ontology technology is nowadays mature enough: many methodologies, tools and languages are already available. The future work in this field should be driven towards the creation of a common integrated workbench for ontology developers to facilitate ontology development, exchange, evaluation, evolution and management, to provide methodological support for these tasks, and translations to and from different ontology languages. This workbench should not be created from scratch, but instead integrating the technology components that are currently available

Creation and extension of ontologies for describing communications in the context of organizations

Thesis submitted to Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in Computer ScienceThe use of ontologies is nowadays a sufficiently mature and solid field of work to be considered an efficient alternative in knowledge representation. With the crescent growth of the Semantic Web, it is expectable that this alternative tends to emerge even more in the near future. In the context of a collaboration established between FCT-UNL and the R&D department of a national software company, a new solution entitled ECC – Enterprise Communications Center was developed. This application provides a solution to manage the communications that enter, leave or are made within an organization, and includes intelligent classification of communications and conceptual search techniques in a communications repository. As specificity may be the key to obtain acceptable results with these processes, the use of ontologies becomes crucial to represent the existing knowledge about the specific domain of an organization. This work allowed us to guarantee a core set of ontologies that have the power of expressing the general context of the communications made in an organization, and of a methodology based upon a series of concrete steps that provides an effective capability of extending the ontologies to any business domain. By applying these steps, the minimization of the conceptualization and setup effort in new organizations and business domains is guaranteed. The adequacy of the core set of ontologies chosen and of the methodology specified is demonstrated in this thesis by its effective application to a real case-study, which allowed us to work with the different types of sources considered in the methodology and the activities that support its construction and evolution

Ontologies for Legal Relevance and Consumer Complaints. A Case Study in the Air Transport Passenger Domain

Applying relevant legal information to settle complaints and disputes is a common challenge for all legal practitioners and laymen. However, the analysis of the concept of relevance itself has thus far attracted only sporadic attention. This thesis bridges this gap by understanding the components of complaints, and by defining relevant legal information, and makes use of computational ontologies and design patterns to represent this relevant knowledge in an explicit and structured way. This work uses as a case-study a real situation of consumer disputes in the Air Transport Passenger domain. Two artifacts were built: the Relevant Legal Information in Consumer Disputes Ontology, and its specialization, the Air Transport Passenger Incidents Ontology, aimed at modelling relevant legal information; and the Complaint Design Pattern proposed to conceptualize complaints. In order to demonstrate the ability of the ontologies to serve as a knowledge base for a computer program providing relevant legal information, a demonstrative application was developed