Semantic oriented ontology cohesion metrics for ontology-based systems

Ontologies play a core role to provide shared knowledge models to semantic-driven applications targeted by Semantic Web. Ontology metrics become an important area because they can help ontology engineers to assess ontology and better control project management and development of ontology based systems, and therefore reduce the risk of project failures. In this paper, we propose a set of ontology cohesion metrics which focuses on measuring (possibly inconsistent) ontologies in the context of dynamic and changing Web. They are: Number of Ontology Partitions (NOP), Number of Minimally Inconsistent Subsets (NMIS) and Average Value of Axiom Inconsistencies (AVAI). These ontology metrics are used to measure ontological semantics rather than ontological structure. They are theoretically validated for ensuring their theoretical soundness, and further empirically validated by a standard test set of debugging ontologies. The related algorithms to compute these ontology metrics also are discussed. These metrics proposed in this paper can be used as a very useful complementarity of existing ontology cohesion metrics.     

本体表示语言研究综述

随着Semantic Web的出现，本体作为人工智能领域中知识的核心已经越来越受到研究者的重视。特别是近十年来，涌现出许许多多本体表示语言，为本体的开发和研究提供了有力的帮助。本文主要介绍了传统的本体语言以及目前常用于万维网的本体语言的特点，并从表达和推理能力等方面对各种本体表示语言进行了分析和比较。在此基础上，总结出本体语言应用的一些规律，对于在开发工作中选择合适的本体语言具有一定的参考价值。     

本体演化管理研究

自W3C主席TimBerncrs-Lee首先提出了语义web的概念后,它正在成为计算机信息处理领域当前研究的热点之一。本体将在“语义Web”中起到至关重要的作用,它通过定义精确的共享术语,以提供某一特定领域可重用的知识。但是这些知识并不是静态的,而是随着时问的推移不断演化。领域的改变、自适应不同的任务、或概念模型的改变都要求本体的变更。随着本体开发变成一个泛化的、协同的过程,本体版本控制和演化管理已成为本体研完中一个重要的领域。本文首先对本体演化的原因和所带来的问题进行分析,然后讨论了本体演化管理的关键技术,着重强调了Web上本体标识和本体变化机制的定义,并对今后的研究工作进行了展望。     

Reusing ontologies on the Semantic Web: A feasibility study

Technologies for the efficient and effective reuse of ontological knowledge are one of the key success factors for the Semantic Web. Putting aside matters of cost or quality, being reusable is an intrinsic property of ontologies, originally conceived of as a means to enable and enhance the interoperability between computing applications. This article gives an account, based on empirical evidence and real-world findings, of the methodologies, methods and tools currently used to perform ontology-reuse processes. We study the most prominent case studies on ontology reuse, published in the knowledge-/ontology-engineering literature from the early nineties. This overview is complemented by two self-conducted case studies in the areas of eHealth and eRecruitment in which we developed Semantic Web ontologies for different scopes and purposes by resorting to existing ontological knowledge on the Web. Based on the analysis of the case studies, we are able to identify a series of research and development challenges which should be addressed to ensure reuse becomes a feasible alternative to other ontology-engineering strategies such as development from scratch. In particular, we emphasize the need for a context- and task-sensitive treatment of ontologies, both from an engineering and a usage perspective, and identify the typical phases of reuse processes which could profit considerably from such an approach. Further on, we argue for the need for ontology-reuse methodologies which optimally exploit human and computational intelligence to effectively operationalize reuse processes.     

A semantic metrics suite for evaluating modular ontologies

Ontologies, which are formal representations of knowledge within a domain, can be used for designing and sharing conceptual models of enterprises information for the purpose of enhancing understanding, communication and interoperability. For representing a body of knowledge, different ontologies may be designed. Recently, designing ontologies in a modular manner has emerged for achieving better reasoning performance, more efficient ontology management and change handling. One of the important challenges in the employment of ontologies and modular ontologies in modeling information within enterprises is the evaluation of the suitability of an ontology for a domain and the performance of inference operations over it. In this paper, we present a set of semantic metrics for evaluating ontologies and modular ontologies. These metrics measure cohesion and coupling of ontologies, which are two important notions in the process of assessing ontologies for enterprise modeling. The proposed metrics are based on semantic-based definitions of relativeness, and dependencies between local symbols, and also between local and external symbols of ontologies. Based on these semantic definitions, not only the explicitly asserted knowledge in ontologies but also the implied knowledge, which is derived through inference, is considered for the sake of ontology assessment. We present several empirical case studies for investigating the correlation between the proposed metrics and reasoning performance, which is an important issue in applicability of employing ontologies in real-world information systems.     

Ontologies: How can They be Built?

Ontologies are an important component in many areas, such as knowledge management and organization, electronic commerce and information retrieval and extraction. Several methodologies for ontology building have been proposed. In this article, we provide an overview of ontology building. We start by characterizing the ontology building process and its life cycle. We present the most representative methodologies for building ontologies from scratch, and the proposed techniques, guidelines and methods to help in the construction task. We analyze and compare these methodologies. We describe current research issues in ontology reuse. Finally, we discuss the current trends in ontology building and its future challenges, namely, the new issues for building ontologies for the Semantic Web.     

Aondê: An ontology Web service for interoperability across biodiversity applications

Biodiversity research requires associating data about living beings and their habitats, constructing sophisticated models and correlating all kinds of information. Data handled are inherently heterogeneous, being provided by distinct (and distributed) research groups, which collect these data using different vocabularies, assumptions, methodologies and goals, and under varying spatio-temporal frames. Ontologies are being adopted as one of the means to alleviate these heterogeneity problems, thus helping cooperation among researchers. While ontology toolkits offer a wide range of operations, they are self-contained and cannot be accessed by external applications. Thus, the many proposals for adopting ontologies to enhance interoperability in application development are either based on the use of ontology servers or of ontology frameworks. The latter support many functions, but impose application recoding whenever ontologies change, whereas the first supports ontology evolution, but for a limited set of functions.This paper presents Aondê—a Web service geared towards the biodiversity domain that combines the advantages of frameworks and servers, supporting ontology sharing and management on the Web. By clearly separating storage concerns from semantic issues, the service provides independence between ontology evolution and the applications that need them. The service provides a wide range of basic operations to create, store, manage, analyze and integrate multiple ontologies. These operations can be repeatedly invoked by client applications to construct more complex manipulations. Aondê has been validated for real biodiversity case studies.     

Terminological ontology learning and population using latent Dirichlet allocation

The success of Semantic Web will heavily rely on the availability of formal ontologies to structure machine understanding data. However, there is still a lack of general methodologies for ontology automatic learning and population, i.e. the generation of domain ontologies from various kinds of resources by applying natural language processing and machine learning techniques In this paper, the authors present an ontology learning and population system that combines both statistical and semantic methodologies. Several experiments have been carried out, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach.     

从ER模式到OWL DL本体的语义保持的翻译

提出了一种从ER模式到OWL DL本体的语义保持的翻译方法.该方法在形式化表示ER模式的基础上,建立ER模式和OWL DL本体之间精确的概念对应,通过一个翻译算法按照一组预定义的映射规则实现模式翻译.理论分析表明,该方法是语义保持的和有效的;算法实现和案例研究进一步证实,完全自动的机器翻译是可实现的.该文方法是原创性的,为Web本体的开发以及数据库和语义Web之间语义互操作的实现开辟了一条有效途径.     

Efficient retrieval of ontology fragments using an interval labeling scheme

Nowadays very large domain ontologies are being developed in life-science areas like Biomedicine, Agronomy, Astronomy, etc. Users and applications can benefit enormously from these ontologies in very different tasks, such as visualization, vocabulary homogenizing and data classification. However, due to their large size, they are often unmanageable for these applications. Instead, it is necessary to provide small and useful fragments of these ontologies so that the same tasks can be performed as if the whole ontology is being used. In this work we present a novel method for efficiently indexing and generating ontology fragments according to the user requirements. Moreover, the generated fragments preserve relevant inferences that can be made with the selected symbols in the original ontology. Such a method relies on an interval labeling scheme that efficiently manages the transitive relationships present in the ontologies. Additionally, we provide an interval’s algebra to compute some logical operations over the ontology concepts. We have evaluated the proposed method over several well-known biomedical ontologies. Results show very good performance and scalability, demonstrating the applicability of the proposed method in real scenarios.     

基于词汇相似度的元素级本体匹配

随着语义Web的不断发展，本体数量日益增加。本体匹配作为本体映射、比较和集成的基础，具有重要的实际意义。由第3届国际语义Web大会(3th ISWC)主办的本体匹配竞赛(EON2004)对多种本体匹配工具进行比较和评估。该文提出了一种元素级本体匹配算法LANA(Lexical Analyzer)，该算法通过计算词汇相似度得到两本体间的元素匹配对。与EON2004中的其它元素级本体匹配方法相比，LANA在没有增加匹配复杂度的基础上，具有较好的准确率和召回率。     

Web information fusion: A review of the state of the art

In this paper, we introduce and overview advances in the field of Web information fusion and integration. As it is such a broad and diverse topic that is researched in many different fields, we choose to provide a unified view by focusing on selected survey articles that extensively cover earlier research contributions. Given the important role that ontologies are playing in Web information fusion and the emergence and fast development of the Semantic Web and Web 3.0 technologies, a separate section is devoted to the topic of ontology research and the Semantic Web. Then, in the section on Web-based support systems, several applications that are enabled as the result of advances in Web information fusion are discussed.     

一种基于有向无环图的本体内聚度度量方法

目前,随着本体的广泛使用和快速发展,本体在结构与语义上变得越来越复杂。如何对本体的质量进行评估成为本体构建和重用的主要问题。在本体构建过程中,对本体进行评估有利于对本体进行重构和优化,以构建高质量的本体。在本体重用过程中,可以帮助用户在候选本体集中选择最优结构的本体。提出一种基于有向无环图(DAG)的本体内聚度度量方法,首先依据有向无环图的结构提出一组本体内聚度度量指标;然后根据已有的度量验证框架对其进行验证,说明度量指标在理论上有效;最后使用经典本体数据集进行实验,说明所提出的本体内聚度度量方法的合理性和有效性,有利于本体的构建和重用。     

本体相似度研究

不同本体之间的交互成为语义Web的首要任务,其中本体相似度计算是本体映射的关健环节。在以往的研究中,本体相似度计算通常专注于模式及其结构的匹配。目前研究朝着进一步考虑本体内部语义信息方向努力。本文描述了语义相似度栈的各个层次,依据各个层次的语义特征对目前本体相似度方法进行分类,并对每种方法进行了详细描述。最后对现有一些主要的本体间相似度计算方法进行归纳总结。这项研究工作将为人们提出新的相似度方法或者组合的计算方法作一个参考。     

Automatic extraction of OWL ontologies from UML class diagrams: a semantics-preserving approach

Full implementation of the Semantic Web requires widespread availability of OWL ontologies. Manual ontology development using current OWL editors remains a tedious and cumbersome task that requires significant understanding of the new ontology language and can easily result in a knowledge acquisition bottleneck. On the other hand, abundant domain knowledge has been specified by existing database schemata such as UML class diagrams. Thus developing an automatic tool for extracting OWL ontologies from existing UML class diagrams is helpful to Web ontology development. In this paper we propose an automatic, semantics-preserving approach for extracting OWL ontologies from existing UML class diagrams. This approach establishes a precise conceptual correspondence between UML and OWL through a semantics-preserving schema translation algorithm. The experiments with our implemented prototype tool, UML2OWL, show that the proposed approach is effective and a fully automatic ontology extraction is achievable. The proposed approach and tool will facilitate the development of Web ontologies and the realization of semantic interoperations between existing Web database applications and the Semantic Web.     

Learning domain ontologies for semantic Web service descriptions

High quality domain ontologies are essential for successful employment of semantic Web services. However, their acquisition is difficult and costly, thus hampering the development of this field. In this paper we report on the first stage of research that aims to develop (semi-)automatic ontology learning tools in the context of Web services that can support domain experts in the ontology building task. The goal of this first stage was to get a better understanding of the problem at hand and to determine which techniques might be feasible to use. To this end, we developed a framework for (semi-)automatic ontology learning from textual sources attached to Web services. The framework exploits the fact that these sources are expressed in a specific sublanguage, making them amenable to automatic analysis. We implement two methods in this framework, which differ in the complexity of the employed linguistic analysis. We evaluate the methods in two different domains, verifying the quality of the extracted ontologies against high quality hand-built ontologies of these domains.

Our evaluation lead to a set of valuable conclusions on which further work can be based. First, it appears that our method, while tailored for the Web services context, might be applicable across different domains. Second, we concluded that deeper linguistic analysis is likely to lead to better results. Finally, the evaluation metrics indicate that good results can be achieved using only relatively simple, off the shelf techniques. Indeed, the novelty of our work is not in the used natural language processing methods but rather in the way they are put together in a generic framework specialized for the context of Web services.     

Learning to match ontologies on the Semantic Web

On the Semantic Web, data will inevitably come from many different ontologies, and information processing across ontologies is not possible without knowing the semantic mappings between them. Manually finding such mappings is tedious, error-prone, and clearly not possible on the Web scale. Hence the development of tools to assist in the ontology mapping process is crucial to the success of the Semantic Web. We describe GLUE, a system that employs machine learning techniques to find such mappings. Given two ontologies, for each concept in one ontology GLUE finds the most similar concept in the other ontology. We give well-founded probabilistic definitions to several practical similarity measures and show that GLUE can work with all of them. Another key feature of GLUE is that it uses multiple learning strategies, each of which exploits well a different type of information either in the data instances or in the taxonomic structure of the ontologies. To further improve matching accuracy, we extend GLUE to incorporate commonsense knowledge and domain constraints into the matching process. Our approach is thus distinguished in that it works with a variety of well-defined similarity notions and that it efficiently incorporates multiple types of knowledge. We describe a set of experiments on several real-world domains and show that GLUE proposes highly accurate semantic mappings. Finally, we extend GLUE to find complex mappings between ontologies and describe experiments that show the promise of the approach.Received: 16 December 2002, Accepted: 16 April 2003, Published online: 17 September 2003Edited by: Edited by B.V. Atluri, A. Joshi, and Y. Yesha     

一种本体知识文摘方法的研究和实现

本体作为领域知识的表示方法，已经成为语义Web的基础。本体通常由领域专家建立，用于表示领域中概念以及概念与概念之间的关系。但这也使得普通用户难以理解本体中描述的信息。普通用户往往希望本体中的信息能够以自然语言的形式描述。这正是本文讨论的主要问题。本文采用分治策略，利用基于嵌套复杂模板的解决方案，设计并实现了本体知识文摘的算法。我们开发了一个原型系统SWARMS，并将该文摘算法进行了运用。初步的实验表明，本文提出的方法取得较好的结果。     

Visualising the effects of ontology changes and studying their understanding with ChImp

Due to the Semantic Web’s decentralised nature, ontology engineers rarely know all applications that leverage their ontology. Consequently, they are unaware of the full extent of possible consequences that changes might cause to the ontology. Our goal is to lessen the gap between ontology engineers and users by investigating ontology engineers’ understanding of ontology changes’ impact at editing time. Hence, this paper introduces the Protégé plugin ChImp which we use to reach our goal. We elicited requirements for ChImp through a questionnaire with ontology engineers. We then developed ChImp according to these requirements and it displays all changes of a given session and provides selected information on said changes and their effects. For each change, it computes a number of metrics on both the ontology and its materialisation. It displays those metrics on both the originally loaded ontology at the beginning of the editing session and the current state to help ontology engineers understand the impact of their changes.We investigated the informativeness of materialisation impact measures, the meaning of severe impact, and also the usefulness of ChImp in an online user study with 36 ontology engineers. We asked the participants to solve two ontology engineering tasks – with and without ChImp (assigned in random order) – and answer in-depth questions about the applied changes as well as the materialisation impact measures. We found that ChImp increased the participants’ understanding of change effects and that they felt better informed. Answers also suggest that the proposed measures were useful and informative. We also learned that the participants consider different outcomes of changes severe, but most would define severity based on the amount of changes to the materialisation compared to its size. The participants also acknowledged the importance of quantifying the impact of changes and that the study will affect their approach of editing ontologies.     

A software engineering approach to ontology building

Ontologies are the backbone of the Semantic Web, a semantic-aware version of the World Wide Web. The availability of large-scale high quality domain ontologies depends on effective and usable methodologies aimed at supporting the crucial process of ontology building. Ontology building exhibits a structural and logical complexity that is comparable to the production of software artefacts. This paper proposes an ontology building methodology that capitalizes the large experience drawn from a widely used standard in software engineering: the Unified Software Development Process or Unified Process (UP). In particular, we propose UP for ONtology (UPON) building, a methodology for ontology building derived from the UP. UPON is presented with the support of a practical example in the eBusiness domain. A comparative evaluation with other methodologies and the results of its adoption in the context of the Athena EU Integrated Project are also discussed.