Abstract
BackgroundThe ontology authoring step in ontology development involves having to make choices about what subject domain knowledge to include. This may concern sorting out ontological differences and making choices between conflicting axioms due to limitations in the logic or the subject domain semantics. Examples are dealing with different foundational ontologies in ontology alignment and OWL 2 DL’s transitive object property versus a qualified cardinality constraint. Such conflicts have to be resolved somehow. However, only isolated and fragmented guidance for doing so is available, which therefore results in ad hoc decision-making that may not be the best choice or forgotten about later.ResultsThis work aims to address this by taking steps towards a framework to deal with the various types of modeling conflicts through meaning negotiation and conflict resolution in a systematic way. It proposes an initial library of common conflicts, a conflict set, typical steps toward resolution, and the software availability and requirements needed for it. The approach was evaluated with an actual case of domain knowledge usage in the context of epizootic disease outbreak, being avian influenza, and running examples with COVID-19 ontologies.ConclusionsThe evaluation demonstrated the potential and feasibility of a conflict resolution framework for ontologies.
Highlights
The ontology authoring step in ontology development involves having to make choices about what subject domain knowledge to include
Two domain ontologies each may be aligned to a different foundational ontology, which may have representational differences where one ontology has a property vaccinates but the other uses a class Vaccination where they intended to mean the same general notion but one chose the process and the other its reified variant, or there are subject domain disagreements, like one having asserted that Virus is an organisms and the other does not
Examples and the case study suggest that conflicts are abound already, and this is likely set to increase with the increasing number of ontologies that are being developed
Summary
The ontology authoring step in ontology development involves having to make choices about what subject domain knowledge to include. This may concern sorting out ontological differences and making choices between conflicting axioms due to limitations in the logic or the subject domain semantics. Examples are dealing with different foundational ontologies in ontology alignment and OWL 2 DL’s transitive object property versus a qualified cardinality constraint. Such conflicts have to be resolved somehow. Two domain ontologies each may be aligned to a different foundational ontology, which may have representational differences where one ontology has a property vaccinates but the other uses a class Vaccination where they intended to mean the same general notion but one chose the process and the other its reified variant, or there are subject domain disagreements, like one having asserted that Virus is an organisms and the other does not
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