Domain Ontology Development Research Articles

Ontology design and individual cognitive peculiarities: A pilot study

The paper presents the main results of the KOMET (Knowledge and cOntent structuring via METhods of collaborative ontology design) project, which aims to develop a novel paradigm for knowledge structuring based on the interplay between cognitive psychology and ontology engineering. By the knowledge structure (a conceptual model) we define the main domain concepts and relations between them in the form of a graph, map or diagram. This approach considers individual cognitive styles and uses recent advances in knowledge engineering and conceptual structuring; it aims to create new, consistent and structurally holistic knowledge bases for various areas of science and technology. Two stages of research have been completed: research into correlations between the expert’s individual cognitive style and the peculiarities of the expert’s subject domain ontology development; and research into correlations between the expert’s individual cognitive style and the group ontology design (including design accomplished by groups of experts with either similar or different cognitive styles). The results of these research stages can be applied to organizing collaborative ontology design (especially for research and learning purposes), data structuring and other group analytical work. Implications for practice are briefly delineated.

How the cognitive features testing can assist in evaluating collective ontology engineering

The paper is devoted to the interplay issues between ontology engineering and cognitive psychology. It describes the study targeted at new visual structuring paradigm of ontology development. Such approach is formed with regard to personal cognitive features. The research was performed within the KOMET (knowledge and content structuring via methods of collaborative ontology design) project. Two phases of research have been done within the project. First was devoted to study of correlations between the expert's personal cognitive style features and the peculiarities of expert's subject domain ontology development procedure. The second deals with research on the relationship between the expert's individual cognitive style and the collective ontology design (including the design performed in groups consisting of experts either of similar or of different cognitive styles). The results of this research project can be applied to organising the collaborative ontology design, data and content structuring and other group analytical work.

Automating ontologies for e-learning

Electronic learning is gaining importance due to the emerging technologies. Many courseware repositories exist that cater to the need of the users, but they do not provide an automatic prerequisite and follow-up identification facility. This model is developed in such a way that it provides such a facility. The solution is obtained by implementing the project using ontological data mining concepts. Ontological data mining helps in the development of domain ontologies from text data automatically by using the term frequency-inverse document frequency method. Thus, the work is implemented in such a way that domain ontologies are generated for a given portable document format file so that the automatic prerequisite and follow-up identification becomes easy. The system extracts the concepts using term frequency-inverse document frequency weighting scheme and then determines the associations among concepts using a priori algorithm. These relationships are used to build the dependency graph which is finally imported to form domain ontology.

An ontology of controversial terms at the core of the systems life cycle

The information system IS discipline has been plagued by the absence of agreed definitions of the numerous terminologies that are used throughout the range of processes and activities employed to deliver applications for productive use. This lack of agreement also has constraining implications for cumulative research in the discipline. In this paper, we propose a solution to the problem that involves the development of a formal IS domain ontology using a methodology that focuses on ensuring the completeness and consistency of the ontology. The ontology provides a mechanism for standardising the vocabulary in the domain, classifying concepts and terms, representing relationships, identifying synonyms and homonyms, and it identifies the instances of these concepts and relationships. Our solution will facilitate knowledge sharing in the information systems community and further scholarly activities which require a deeper understanding of the structure of information in this domain.

Using Natural Language Programming (NLP) Technology To Model Domain Ontology OTO by Extracting Occupational Therapy Concepts

Creation and development of formal domain ontology of Occupational Therapy (OTO) requires the prescription and formal evaluation of the results through specific criteria. UPON Methontology of development ontologies was followed to create OTO ontology, and was implemented by using Protege-OWL. Accuracy of OTO ontology was assessed using a set of ontology design criteria. This paper describes a software engineering approach to model domain ontology for occupational therapy resources (OTO) using Natural Language Programming (NLP) technology. The rules were written to annotate the domain concepts using Java Annotation Patterns Engine (JAPE) grammar. It is used to support regular expression matching and thus annotate OT concepts by using the GATE developer tool. This speeds up the time-consuming development of the ontology, which is important for experts in the domain who face time constraints and high workloads. The rules provide significant results: the pattern matching of OT concepts based on the lookup list produced 403 correct concepts and the accuracy was generally higher. Using NLP technique is a good approach to reducing the domain expert’s work, and the results can be evaluated. This study contributes to the understanding of ontology development and evaluation methods to address the knowledge gap of using ontology in the decision support system component of occupational therapy.

Building ontologies for different natural languages

Ontology construction of a certain domain is an important step in applying the Semantic web. A number of software tools adapted for building domain ontologies of most wide-spread natural languages are available, but accomplishing that for any given natural language presents a challenge. Here we propose a semi-automatic procedure to create ontologies for different natural languages. Our approach utilizes various software tools available on the Internet most notably DODDLE-OWL - a domain ontology development tool implemented for English and Japanese languages. By using this tool, WordNet, Prot?g? and XSLT transformations, we propose a general procedure to construct domain ontology for any natural language.

Building up a class hierarchy with properties by refining and integrating Japanese Wikipedia Ontology and Japanese WordNet

Previously, we constructed the Japanese Wikipedia Ontology JWO via a semi-automatic process using the Japanese Wikipedia, but it had problems due to a lack of upper classes and appropriate definitions of properties. Thus, the aim of the current study was to complement the upper classes in JWO by refining and integrating JWO and Japanese WordNet JWN to build a class hierarchy with defined properties based on the considerations of property inheritance. To achieve this, we developed tools that help users to refine the class-instance relationships, to identify the JWO classes that need to be aligned with JWN synsets, and to align the JWO classes with the JWN synsets via user interaction. We also integrated JWO and JWN using a domain ontology development environment, DODDLE-OWL. We also propose a method for building a class hierarchy with defined properties by elevating the common properties defined in sibling classes to higher classes in JWO.

Development of Upper Domain Ontologies for Knowledge Preservation of Unani Medicines

Observing the role of traditional medicines in global healthcare, World Health Organization signifies the need to preserve knowledge of this valuable intellectual property which is being lost or inaccessible, as it is either undocumented or local in context. Unani medicines, a 2500 years old system, has been practiced in Asia, is facing the same situation. Little computerization effort has been done so far earlier in this domain. To preserve the knowledge of Unani medicines, a formal semantic structure is required that is machine readable and reusable. This paper defines a conceptual structure of Unani medicines using upper domain ontology that includes core philosophy, diseases, diagnosis, symptoms, drugs, and treatment of patients. Developed in Protege, designers have no past experience in ontology development; information collected from books and expert interviews. The proposed ontology serves as a backbone in upcoming knowledge management framework of Unani medicines.

Modeling Domain Ontology for Occupational Therapy Resources Using Natural Language Programming (NLP) Technology to Model Domain Ontology of Occupational Therapy Resources

Creation and development of a formal domain ontology of Ocuupational Therapy (OT) requires the prescription and formal evaluation of the results through specific criteria. Methontology of development ontologies was followed to create OTO ontology, and was implemented by using Protégé- OWL. Accuracy of OTO ontology was assessed using a set of ontology design cretria. This paper describes a software engineering approach to model domain ontology for occupational therapy resources (OT) using Natural Language Programming (NLP) technology. The rules were written to annotate the domain concepts using Java Annotation Patterns Engine (JAPE) grammar. It is used to support regular expression matching and thus annotate OT concepts by using the GATE developer tool. This speeds up the time-consuming development of the ontology, which is important for experts in the domain facing time constraints and high workloads. The rules provide significant results: the pattern matching of OT concepts based on the lookup list produced 403 correct concepts and the accuracy was generally higher. Using NLP technique is a good approach to reducing the domain expert's work, and the results can be evaluated. This study contributes to the understanding of ontology development and evaluation methods to address the knowledge gap of using ontology in the decision support system component of occupational therepy.

Ontology for real estate cadastre

Standardisation efforts in the geospatial domain, provided by ISO TC 211 and OpenGIS Consortium, have brought many specifications and standards that define structure and encoding rules of data and interfaces of services. These standards provide syntactic interoperability of geospatial data and services, while neglecting their semantics. In order to achieve semantic interoperability, i.e. explicitly define the meaning of data and services to make them understandable both to machines and humans, there are attempts to develop Geospatial Semantic Web, where semantics of data will be expressed explicitly and formally. An important part of this process is the development of domain ontologies, i.e. a common vocabulary in some domain. In order to bring semantics into cadastral systems, it is necessary to develop ontology for real estate cadastre. Therefore, the authors propose the ontology based knowledge model in the field of real estate cadastre based on ISO 19152 international standard and other geospatial standards, as a core ontology for cadastre on top of which a domain ontology for a specific country should be built. The domain ontology presented in this paper refers to the real estate cadastre of Serbia, but a similar approach can be adopted for different cadastral organisations in other countries. In this way, different domain ontologies based on various cadastral organisations will conform to the same standard based core ontology that will provide a basis for the semantic search and integration of cadastral data on national and international level.

Semantic Web Ontology Integration Based on Formal Concept Analysis

Matchmaking is the basis of doing service discovery and composition. Using ontology semantically express the service of capabilities, correctly match service. Domain ontology and Formal Concept Analysis aim at modeling concept. The role of FCA in ontology engineering is supporting reusing independently developed domain ontology. Evaluating concept similarity identifies the different concepts that are semantically close. In this paper, using concept and attribute of web services to construct the ontology. Also, an ontology based method for assessing similarity between FCA concepts is proposed.

A system for the extraction and representation of summary of product characteristics content

Information about medications is critical in supporting decision-making during the prescription process and thus in improving the safety and quality of care. In this work, we propose a methodology for the automatic recognition of drug-related entities (active ingredient, interaction effects, etc.) in textual drug descriptions, and their further location in a previously developed domain ontology. The summary of product characteristics (SPC) represents the basis of information for health professionals on how to use medicines. However, this information is locked in free-text and, as such, cannot be actively accessed and elaborated by computerized applications. Our approach exploits a combination of machine learning and rule-based methods. It consists of two stages. Initially it learns to classify this information in a structured prediction framework, relying on conditional random fields. The classifier is trained and evaluated using a corpus of about a hundred SPCs. They have been hand-annotated with different semantic labels that have been derived from the domain ontology. At a second stage the extracted entities are added in the domain ontology corresponding concepts as new instances, using a set of rules manually-constructed from the corpus. Our evaluations show that the extraction module exhibits high overall performance, with an average F1-measure of 88% for contraindications and 90% for interactions. SPCs can be exploited to provide structured information for computer-based decision support systems.

An enhancement of the Role-Based Access Control model to facilitate information access management in context of team collaboration and workflow

Although information access control models have been developed and applied to various applications, few of the previous works have addressed the issue of managing information access in the combined context of team collaboration and workflow. To facilitate this requirement, we have enhanced the Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model through formulating universal constraints, defining bridging entities and contributing attributes, extending access permissions to include workflow contexts, synthesizing a role-based access delegation model to target on specific objects, and developing domain ontologies as instantiations of the general model to particular applications. We have successfully applied this model to the New York State HIV Clinical Education Initiative (CEI) project to address the specific needs of information management in collaborative processes. An initial evaluation has shown this model achieved a high level of agreement with an existing system when applied to 4576 cases (kappa=0.801). Comparing to a reference standard, the sensitivity and specificity of the enhanced RBAC model were at the level of 97–100%. These results indicate that the enhanced RBAC model can be effectively used for information access management in context of team collaboration and workflow to coordinate clinical education programs. Future research is required to incrementally develop additional types of universal constraints, to further investigate how the workflow context and access delegation can be enriched to support the various needs on information access management in collaborative processes, and to examine the generalizability of the enhanced RBAC model for other applications in clinical education, biomedical research, and patient care.

Development of Domain Ontology in Information Science Based on FCA and Association Rules

Development of Domain Ontology in Information Science Based on FCA and Association Rules

Medical Ontology in the Dynamic Healthcare Environment

Advances in medical care and computer technology in recent decades have expanded the parameters of the traditional domain of medical services. This scenario has created new opportunities for building applications to provide enterprise services in an efficient, diverse and highly dynamic environment. Yet the involvement of multiple factors in healthcare systems, such as diverse professionals and embedded devices, has made IT-based healthcare systems expensive, competitive and complex. The deployment of different programming languages, platforms and data management standards has led to restrictions in flawless exchange, integration and reuse of information across different systems. In this regard, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an advanced methodology that can be used for developing loosely coupled, dynamic, flexible, distributed and cost-effective applications. SOA relies on services and can handle complexity and heterogeneity with the help of ontologies. In this paper, we show our development of domain ontology for the effective handling of IT-based healthcare system problems especially during an emergency.

A pathway to personalization of integrated treatment: informatics and decision science in psychiatric rehabilitation.

Personalization of treatment is a current strategic goal for improving health care. Integrated treatment approaches such as psychiatric rehabilitation benefit from personalization because they involve matching diverse arrays of treatment options to individually unique profiles of need. The need for personalization is evident in the heterogeneity of people with severe mental illness and in the findings of experimental psychopathology. One pathway to personalization lies in analysis of the judgments and decision making of human experts and other participants as they respond to complex circumstances in pursuit of treatment and rehabilitation goals. Such analysis is aided by computer simulation of human decision making, which in turn informs development of computerized clinical decision support systems. This inspires a research program involving concurrent development of databases, domain ontology, and problem-solving algorithms, toward the goal of personalizing psychiatric rehabilitation through human collaboration with intelligent cyber systems. The immediate hurdle is to demonstrate that clinical decisions beyond diagnosis really do affect outcome. This can be done by supporting the hypothesis that a human treatment team with access to a reasonably comprehensive clinical database that tracks patient status and treatment response over time achieves better outcome than a treatment team without such access, in a controlled experimental trial. Provided the hypothesis can be supported, the near future will see prototype systems that can construct an integrated assessment, formulation, and rehabilitation plan from clinical assessment data and contextual information. This will lead to advanced systems that collaborate with human decision makers to personalize psychiatric rehabilitation and optimize outcome.

Combining Ontology Development Methodologies and Semantic Web Platforms for E-government Domain Ontology Development

One of the key challenges in electronic government (e-government) is the development of systems that can be easily integrated and interoperated to provide seamless services delivery to citizens. In recent years, Semantic Web technologies based on ontology have emerged as promising solutions to the above engineering problems. However, current research practicing semantic development in e-government does not focus on the application of available methodologies and platforms for developing government domain ontologies. Furthermore, only a few of these researches provide detailed guidelines for developing semantic ontology models from a government service domain. This research presents a case study combining an ontology building methodology and two state-of-the-art Semantic Web platforms namely Protege and Java Jena ontology API for semantic ontology development in e-government. Firstly, a framework adopted from the Uschold and King ontology building methodology is employed to build a domain ontology describing the semantic content of a government service domain. Thereafter, UML is used to semi-formally represent the domain ontology. Finally, Protege and Jena API are employed to create the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and Resource Description Framework (RDF) representations of the domain ontology respectively to enable its computer processing. The study aims at: (1) providing e-government developers, particularly those from the developing world with detailed guidelines for practicing semantic content development in their e-government projects and (2), strengthening the adoption of semantic technologies in e-government. The study would also be of interest to novice Semantic Web developers who might used it as a starting point for further investigations.

Ontology Molecule Theory-based Information Integrated Service for Agricultural Risk Management

Currently Chinese agriculture is facing a serious challenge of the natural risk, market risk and information risk, etc. At the same time, agricultural risk management is under the constraints of concept, capital investment, information sharing, and legal conditions. From the perspective of the information integrated services, this paper made efforts to provide some information and strategy support for the agricultural risk management. By applying a new theory in the field of the ontology and knowledge management, namely, the ontology molecule theory, this paper discussed the principles and process of developing domain ontology of the agricultural risks. An information integrated service model for the agricultural risk management, which consisted of six modules, was designed on the basis of the ontology molecule theory. The paper emphasized on discussing the function modules and the implementation of the integrated service model.

Enabling the development of base domain ontology through extraction of knowledge from engineering domain handbooks

Domain ontology, encompassing both concepts and instances, along with their relations and properties, is a new medium for the storage and propagation of domain specific knowledge. A significant problem remains the effort which must be expended during ontology construction. This involves collecting the domain-related vocabularies, developing the domain concept hierarchy, and defining the properties of each concept and the relationships between concepts. Recently several engineering handbooks have described detailed domain knowledge by organizing the knowledge into categories, sections, and chapters with indices in the appendix. This paper proposes the extraction of concepts, instances, and relationships from a handbook of a specific domain to quickly construct base domain ontology as a good starting point for expediting the development process of more comprehensive domain ontology. The extracted information can also be reorganized and converted into web ontology language format to represent the base domain ontology. The generation of a base domain ontology from an Earthquake Engineering Handbook is used to illustrate the proposed approach. In addition, quality evaluation of the extracted base ontology is performed and discussed.

Integrating Ontologies into Multi-Agent Systems Engineering (MaSE) for University Teaching Environment

Multi-agent systems have received much attention in recent years because of their many advantages in complex and distributed environments. There are a number of methodologies have been proposed for multi- agent engineering process such as Multi-agent System Engineering (MaSE). I have used the MaSE engineering process for the development of my ontology based multi- agent system for the Academic Institute. In the era of Semantic Web, the ontology has established as a powerful tool to enable knowledge sharing and it is an important means in Semantic Web to achieve the semantic interoperability among heterogeneous distributed systems. Both ontology and agent technologies are central to the semantic web, and their combined use will enable the sharing of heterogeneous, autonomous knowledge sources in a capable, adaptable and extensible manner. Ontology is used throughout the multi-agent system to assist the interactions among different agents as well as to improve the quality of the service provided by each agent. This paper focuses on the utilization of combining both Ontology and Multi-Agent System (MAS) structure towards system integration for University teaching environment. In this paper, I include system prototype for ontology based multi-agent system. I have used Web Ontology Language (OWL) for the development of domain ontology for the Academic Institute and KQML as an agent communication language. Finally I have developed ontology-based multi- agent system for the university teaching environment by taking the benefits of both renowned technologies.