Conto: A Protégé Plugin for Configuring Ontologies

Abstract

With the extensive proliferation of data, the efficient organization and integration of data has become exceedingly important. To achieve this, ontologies have been employed to govern the data by providing structure and a layer of abstraction over the data sources. However, the ontologies themselves present shortcomings in how they capture the definition of concepts of a domain. The definitions are static and unable to sufficiently conceptualize the dynamic data sources in a way that makes use of the knowledge provided by the data. This limitation carries over to the reasoning processes performed using ontologies.We introduce Conto, a Protégé plugin that overcomes this limitation by interpreting a concept as an abstract data type. These interpretations allow for new ways of understanding the data, which when coupled with knowledge generation processes leads to the generation of new knowledge that would traditionally be unobtainable.