Guidelines for a Dynamic Ontology - Integrating Tools of Evolution and Versioning in Ontology

Ontologies are built on systems that conceptually evolve over time. In addition, techniques and languages for building ontologies evolve too. This has led to numerous studies in the field of ontology versioning and ontology evolution. This paper presents a new way to manage the lifecycle of an ontology incorporating both versioning tools and evolution process. This solution, called VersionGraph, is integrated in the source ontology since its creation in order to make it possible to evolve and to be versioned. Change management is strongly related to the model in which the ontology is represented. Therefore, we focus on the OWL language in order to take into account the impact of the changes on the logical consistency of the ontology like specified in OWL DL

OntoVersionGraph: une méthodologie de gestion du changement dédiée aux ontologies formelles et leurs vues utilisateurs dans un contexte collaboratif: Application aux ontologies SHOIN(D)

The world changes over time, impacting the knowledge of every subdomain it contains. Therefore systems describing the knowledge of a certain domain should be able to consider changes occurred to keep its knowledge representation up-to-date. Formal ontologies are one of them: they explicitly and formally represent the knowledge of a domain in all its forms and modes of existence. Collaboratively developed, a formal ontology allows the domain users to understand each other by sharing the same terminology despite the different assumptions they have on the domain conceptualization. However, due to its completeness, the complexity of its conceptualization can sometimes make the domain knowledge inaccessible for its users. Also domain users often need to access only a subset of this knowledge. Light sub-portions of the ontology or views defined by their assumptions should then be produced to provide domain users a personalized and comprehensive view of the domain knowledge described by the ontology. Considering such ontology, the world changes may impact both domain knowledge and users assumptions and their application can turn inconsistent the knowledge represented by the ontology and its views. However, an inconsistent ontology is no longer usable by the domain community. Ontology change management should ensure maintaining its consistency, so that its users can continue to cooperate and understand each other. Also, a formal ontology requires a collaborative development to take into account every domain user assumption, so does its change management. The problem is the following: how to enable collaborative ontology change management considering changes in the domain and new domain users assumptions? Until now, existing research in the Semantic Web does not allow such change management for formal ontologies. The contribution of my thesis therefore consists in designing an approach to ontology change management dedicated to formal ontologies enabling: the specification of ontology views based on new domain users assumptions, the consistent collaborative evolution of the ontology and its views, and the change impact management between them.Le monde change au fil du temps. Cela impacte la connaissance de chaque sous-domaine qu'il contient. Par conséquent, les systèmes décrivant la connaissance d'un certain sous-domaine du monde devraient être en mesure de tenir compte de ses changements afin de maintenir la représentation de ses connaissances à jour. L’ontologie formelle est l'un d'eux: elle représente explicitement et formellement la connaissance d'un domaine sous toutes ses formes et modes d'existence. Développée en collaboration par des experts du domaine, elle permet aux usagers d’un domaine de se comprendre en partageant la même terminologie sur ce domaine, malgré les différentes hypothèses que ceux-ci portent sur sa conceptualisation. Toutefois, à cause de son exhaustivité, la complexité de sa conceptualisation peut parfois rendre inaccessible la connaissance du domaine à ses usagers. Aussi les usagers du domaine n’ont souvent besoin d’accéder qu’à un sous-ensemble de celle-ci. Des sous-portions de l’ontologie ou vues définies selon leurs hypothèses devraient donc être produites pour leur fournir une vue personnalisée et compréhensible de la connaissance décrite par celle-ci. Considérant une telle ontologie, les changements du monde peuvent avoir un impact à la fois sur la connaissance du domaine mais aussi sur les hypothèses de ses usagers. Cependant, leur application peut rendre incohérente la connaissance représentée par l'ontologie et par ses vues usagers. Aussi, une ontologie incohérente n'est plus utilisable par la communauté. La gestion du changement de l'ontologie doit assurer le maintien de sa cohérence afin que les usagers du domaine puissent continuer à coopérer et à se comprendre. Comme une ontologie formelle requiert un développement collaboratif pour prendre en compte chaque hypothèse usager, il en va de sa gestion du changement. Le problème est donc le suivant : comment mener une gestion du changement collaborative dédiée aux ontologies formelles prenant en compte les changements survenus dans le domaine ainsi que les nouvelles hypothèses usager ? Les travaux de recherche existant au sein du Web sémantique ne permettent actuellement pas une telle gestion du changement ontologique. C’est pourquoi la contribution de ma thèse consiste à concevoir une approche de gestion du changement dédiée aux ontologies formelles, permettant : la spécification de vues usagers sur une ontologie sur la base de nouvelles hypothèses usagers, l'évolution collaborative et cohérente de l'ontologie et de ses vues, et la gestion de l’impact des changements entre celles-ci

A Meta-Conceptual Modeling Approach for Change Modeling in Applied Ontology

International audienceFormal ontologies are explicitly representation of domain knowledge. Ontology change management should ensure maintaining its consistency, so that its users can continue to cooperate and understand each other. This paper presents a meta-conceptual modeling approach for change modeling in the domain of applied ontology. This modeling approach makes use a mathematical structure to model ontologies and its changes in order to make possible the qualification of changes regarding its consistency. Actually, the paper focuses on the meta-conceptual modeling approach inspired by Guarino's formal ontology building process

Towards Dynamic Ontology - Integrating Tools of Evolution and Versionning in Ontology

6International audienceSince Gruber's definition, a lot of works focused on evolution or versioning issues. Not much attention has been paid to integrated solutions which resolve both these two purposes. In this paper we present a new semantic architecture that combines versioning tools with the evolution process. This architecture called VersionGraph is integrated in the source ontology since its creation in order to make it possible to evolve and to be versioned

A Structural SHOIN(D) Ontology Model for Change Modelling

5 pagesInternational audienceThis paper presents a complete structural ontology model suited for change modelling on SHOIN(D) ontologies. The application of this model is illustrated along the paper through the description of an ontology example inspired by the UOBM ontology benchmark and its evolution

An ontology change management approach for facility management

International audienceFacility management (FM) or technical property management is an approach to operate, maintain, improve and adapt buildings and infrastructures of organizations. A FM project requires the cooperation of many actors from different domains so it has to be automated in a constrained collaborative environment. This paper proposes a new approach for ontology change management applied on facility management of such projects. The industrial challenge is, firstly, to ensure consistency of a FM project knowledge from the construction phase to the technical property management phase (after delivery). Secondly, it has to provide to each actor of the project a personal up-to-date “view” of the building knowledge related to its business profile and allow its evolution. The scientific approach, called OntoVersionGraph, is a change management methodology for managing ontology life cycle including ontology evolution and versioning features, in conjunction with contextual view modeling. Its contribution is the impact management of changes between the ontology and its different views

Ontological Analysis and Modularization of CIDOC-CRM

Conference cancelled due to COVID19International audienceThe CIDOC-CRM ontology is a standard for cultural heritage data modeling. Despite its large exploitation, the ontology is primarily maintained in a semi-formal notation, which makes it difficult to homogeneously exploit it in digital environments. In addition, the ontology consists of several classes and relations, whereas one sometimes wishes to reuse it but only partially. The purpose of the paper is to contribute to the use of CIDOC by strengthening its foundations. On the basis of formal ontology theories, we propose a first analysis of the ontology to enhance its conceptual structure. We also present a preliminary modularization of CIDOC aimed at enhancing both its formalization and usage

Ontology Views for Ontology Change Management

International audienceIn the literature, ontology change management systems (OCMS) are direct implementation of the concept of “change management” stated by reference (Klein, 2004). Ontology change management combines ontol- ogy evolution and versioning features to manage ontol- ogy changes and their impacts. Since 2007, many works have combined ontology evolution and versioning into ontology change management systems (OCMS). The evolution subject has been massively studied in these works. They especially addressed the consistence issue for the application of changes on the ontology. These proposals constituted a consequent background for ontology change management but they did not take into account certain specificities of ontologies.One of them is the fact that ontologies are decen- tralized data Rajugan (2006). It means that multiple versions of the same ontology evolution are bound to exist over the Web and must be supported. It implies that ontology chronological evolution is not enough to manage ontologies. Actually, managing different paral- lel versions of a same ontology would bridge this gap.Another characteristic is that ontologies are meant to grow during their lifecycle and may become too large to be used in its original scale by potential ap- plications. Indeed, ontology development implies a dynamic and incremental process starting from the creation of a brute ontology, which has to be revised and refined (Djedidi, 2009). Refinement often leads to the improvement of the ontology level of detailcorresponding to the addition of new elements to its conceptualization. Therefore the ontology size may in- crease after each refinement iteration, with no guaranty that the ontology is still manageable by applications and understandable by humans.In the literature, ontology views have been defined to bridge this ontology size issue and improve ontology reusability. Several definitions and implementations of ontology views have been studied in the Ontology View Management specific research field. However no agreement was found. Nevertheless, a view generally is a subset specification on an ontology, which allows to extract a manageable portion of the ontology capable to be used and queried by applications like the whole ontology. The resulting sub-ontology can be generated not only as a sub-graph of the ontology but also as an independent ontology, itself being a new interpreta- tion of the domain. It can be considered as a new parallel version of the actual ontology validating the decentralized quality of ontologies. From the different approaches studied in this article, can be deduced four types of view specification and implementation: query language based, subset extraction based, rule based and other views specifications based on hybrid techniques.This article aims at giving an overall state of the art on ontology views, their objectives, their different implementations and use, the corresponding advantages and lacks, and finally defining the future research directions to take in the context of Ontology Change Management

Modeling Changes for SHOIN(D) Ontologies: An Exhaustive Structural Model

6 pagesInternational audienceOntology development starts with a rigorous ontological analysis that provides a conceptualization of the domain to model agreed by the community. An ontology, specified in a formal language, approximates the intended models of this conceptualization. It needs then to be revised and refined until an ontological commitment is found. Also ulterior updates, responding to changes in the domain and/or the conceptualization, are expected to occur throughout the ontology life cycle. To handle a consistent application of changes, a couple of ontology evolution methodologies have been proposed. Maintaining the structural consistency is one of the ontology evolution criteria. It implies modeling changes with respect to how the constructs of the ontology language are used. However there is no ontology model, among those proposed, that allows to exhaustively describe changes and their impact for languages based on SHOIN(D) description logic. To bridge this gap, this paper presents a complete structural ontology model suited for change modeling on SHOIN(D) ontologies. The application of this model is illustrated along the paper through the description of an ontology exampl