General Ontology Research Articles

Improving the Domain Independence of Data Provenance Ontologies

Provenance is becoming increasingly important as more and more people are using data that they themselves did not generate. In the last decade, significant efforts have been directed toward developing generic, shared data provenance ontologies that support the interoperability of provenance across systems. An issue that is impeding the use of such provenance ontologies is that a generic provenance ontology, no matter how complete it is, is insufficient for capturing the diverse, complex provenance requirements in different domains. In this paper, the authors propose a novel approach to adapting and extending the W7 model, a well-known generic ontology of data provenance. Relying on various knowledge expansion mechanisms provided by the Conceptual Graph formalism, the authors' approach enables us to develop domain ontologies of provenance in a disciplined yet flexible way.

Generic Educational Nomination for Internationals University Structures – Ontology - GENIUS-Ontology

Purpose – This paper aims to present the results of the research and development of an Generic Ontology with terms nominations that would be applied to different Educational organizations. Design/methodology/approach – the research approach is qualitative, a applied research based on research and development. As Methodological type, it has a component of exploratory and documental research, had as field Research with specialist interviews. As technics and tools, it was used Internet for online research on universities organizational charts, open and unstructured interviews in the field research. In the development stage it was used two main software tools: OntoKEM e Protege ontology editor. The ontology development was applied to a real case - the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil – with a knowledge elicitation process by extensive interviews with a domain specialist. Findings – Although universities use different names the roles in academic organizations of high education as Universities do not differ significantly. In fact the work of find common nomination for the same role demanded a lot of discussion and, therefore, a lot of time. However the feasibility of direct application is very high. Practical implications and originality – As result, differently from what was available as domain ontology till then, now there is available online an ontology that may be used directly for virtually any University organization.

COURSR2: An Integrated Time Management System for Lifelong Learners

This article presents COURSR2, an intelligent system aiming at managing the personal time of lifelong learners in an integrated way. Lifelong learners usually try to combine learning with their professional and family duties. Taking in advance informative decisions about whether they have the necessary time resources to devote to a learning object is crucial, both for psychological and for financial reasons. COURSR2 encompasses information for all temporal aspects of a learning object. For example, a course may have lectures, with cardinality constraints over attending them, labs, mid-term exams, final exams, homework, projects and home reading. The user can also represent his non-educational activities, using the general purpose ontology of the SELFPLANNER intelligent calendar application. By subscribing to a learning object through COURSR2, the scheduling engine of SELFPLANNER’s is employed to find viable plans, allowing rescheduling of existing activities. Thus, the learner is able to perform what-if analysis about whether a set of learning objects is compatible with each other, as well as with his other commitments. The latest version of COURSR2 has been deployed and evaluated using real users.

Modelling Management Practices in Viticulture while Considering Resource Limitations: The Dhivine Model.

Many farming-system studies have investigated the design and evaluation of crop-management practices with respect to economic performance and reduction in environmental impacts. In contrast, little research has been devoted to analysing these practices in terms of matching the recurrent context-dependent demand for resources (labour in particular) with those available on the farm. This paper presents Dhivine, a simulation model of operational management of grape production at the vineyard scale. Particular attention focuses on representing a flexible plan, which organises activities temporally, the resources available to the vineyard manager and the process of scheduling and executing the activities. The model relies on a generic production-system ontology used in several agricultural production domains. The types of investigations that the model supports are briefly illustrated. The enhanced realism of the production-management situations simulated makes it possible to examine and understand properties of resource-constrained work-organisation strategies and possibilities for improving them.

An ontology driven privacy framework for collaborative working environments

The ability to collaborate has always been vitally important to organisations. With the availability of current networking and computing power, the creation of collaborative working environments CWEs has allowed for this process to occur anytime over any geographical distance. While the strength of a CWE is its ability to allow for the exchange of information freely between collaborators, this opens the users up to a possible loss of privacy. In this work, the issue of protecting privacy while collaborating is discussed. To address the privacy concerns that are raised, a privacy framework is presented. This framework contains a generic privacy ontology that allows the framework to adapt to any domain, a reasoning engine that infers who has access to what information according to which privacy rules, and a collaborative privacy manager CPM which can make decisions and assist collaborating users with their privacy protection. The main objective of this work is to present the generic ontology of privacy and to highlight tasks the CPM performs within a CWE. This work has been deployed through a prototype tool that demonstrates a scenario between a hospital and a university.

A semantic model for electronic government and its enforcement in the Province of Misiones, Argentina

Governments tend not to share public service information between departments. Rather, information related to a given department remains within it, and so citizens must request the information they need from each individually. Thus, locating a service provided by the government, or related information, is a time-consuming task for the interested party. To meet these citizens' demands, the service agencies must collect and organise a lot of information from various sources and formats. In this paper, we present a conceptual representation of the organisational units of the government viewed as entities of a semantic model. Generic electronic government ontology (EGO) is presented, designed under linked open data principles. This technology has been used in a real-life scenario with mobile technologies, to provide citizens with a comprehensive way of finding all the information they need and which in turn will help them in their dealings with government departments.

Towards intelligent manufacturing, semantic modelling for the steel industry.

Product quality, cost efficiency, production flexibility and enhancement of industrial performance are the targets of the intelligent manufacturing vision. This raises new challenges for the development of automation and industrial IT solutions. In particular the availability of semantic description of data and data sources aligned with product, production and process information is a necessary condition for the realization of the objectives. This paper presents a generic ontology based approach for the semantic modelling of data sources establishing the basis for seamless information exchange.

DL-Lite Ontology Revision Based on An Alternative Semantic Characterization

Ontology engineering and maintenance require (semi-)automated ontology change operations. Intensive research has been conducted on TBox and ABox changes in description logics (DLs), and various change operators have been proposed in the literature. Existing operators largely fall into two categories: syntax-based and model-based. While each approach has its advantages and disadvantages, an important topic that has rarely been explored is how to achieve a balance between syntax-based and model-based approaches. Also, most existing operators are specially designed for either TBox change or ABox change, and cannot handle the general ontology revision task—given a DL knowledge base (KB, a pair consisting of a TBox and an ABox), how to revise it by a set of TBox and ABox axioms ( i.e. , a new DL KB). In this article, we introduce an alternative structure for DL-Lite, called a featured interpretation, and show that featured models provide a finite and tight characterization to the classical semantics of DL-Lite. A key issue for defining a change operator is the so-called expressibility, that is, whether a set of models (or featured models here) is axiomatizable in DLs. It is indeed much easier to obtain expressibility results for featured models than for classical DL models. As a result, the new semantics determined by featured models provides a method for defining and studying various changes of DL-Lite KBs that involve both TBoxes and ABoxes. To demonstrate the usefulness of the new semantic characterization in ontology change, we define two revision operators for DL-Lite KBs using featured models and study their properties. In particular, we show that our two operators both satisfy AGM postulates. We show that the complexity of our revisions is Π P 2 -complete, that is, on the same level as major revision operators in propositional logic, which further justifies the feasibility of our revision approach for DL-Lite. Also, we develop algorithms for these DL-Lite revisions.

Generic ontology of datatypes

We present OntoDT, a generic ontology for the representation of scientific knowledge about datatypes. OntoDT defines basic entities, such as datatype, properties of datatypes, specifications, characterizing operations, and a datatype taxonomy. We demonstrate the utility of OntoDT on several use cases. OntoDT was used within an Ontology of core data mining entities for constructing taxonomies of datasets, data mining tasks, generalizations and data mining algorithms. Furthermore, we show how OntoDT can be used to annotate and query dataset repositories. We also show how OntoDT can improve the representation of datatypes in the BioXSD exchange format for basic bio-informatics types of data. The generic nature of OntoDT enables it to support a wide range of other applications, especially in combination with other domain specific ontologies: the construction of data mining workflows, annotation of software and algorithms, semantic annotation of scientific articles, etc. OntoDT is open source and is available at http://www.ontodt.com.

Gilbert Simondon e uma filosofia biológica da técnica

The present article aims to show the meaning of the biological philosophy of technique in Gilbert Simondon. This concept puts into action a reading of the French philosopher's philosophy of technique as a regional ontology within his ontogenetic general ontology, which in that particular scheme is based on an organic model. We will elaborate this to show that the individuation of technical objects, their concretization marked by their functional overdetermination, forces us to think of them in its organicity and from a general organology. Moreover, the concepts of adaptation and associated environment also contribute as biological aspects that accompany Simondon's conception of the mode of existence of technical beings. As a result, we will see that the more concrete and adapted the technical object is - in the series of its specific evolution - the more it comes closer to the proper biological individuality. This approximation will not have, however, the meaning of a complete assimilation between the technical (especially the machinical) and the organic. In the vital self-production, Simondon demonstrates that there always remains something beyond the machinical, namely, the idea of an absolute vital source of technical objects as a guided mutation. We will show that such a source is not merely human, but also extends to other spheres of the vital domain.

Recursive Ontology: A Systemic Theory of Reality

The article introduces recursive ontology, a general ontology which aims to describe how being is organized and what are the processes that drive it. In order to answer those questions, I use a multidisciplinary approach that combines the theory of levels, philosophy and systems theory. The main claim of recursive ontology is that being is the product of a single recursive process of generation that builds up all of reality in a hierarchical fashion from fundamental physical particles to human societies. To support this assumption, I provide the general laws and the basic principles of recursive ontology as well as a semi-formalised model of the theory based on a recursive generative grammar. Recursive ontology not only actively promotes a multidisciplinary investigation of reality, but also can be used as a general framework to develop future domain-specific theories.

Book Review: “Classifying Reality,” by David S. Oderberg (ed.) (2013)

Book Review: “Classifying Reality,” by David S. Oderberg (ed.) (2013)

From Odd Encounters to a Prospective Confluence: Dance-Philosophy

This text inquires into the relationship between Western philosophy and Western theatre dance from their odd encounters in modernity to the current affiliations between contemporary choreographic poetics, critical theory and contemporary philosophical thought. The point of departure for the inquiry is a discussion of the three problems that have structured the historically vexed relationship between dance and philosophy: dance’s belated acquisition of the status of an art discipline, the special ontological status of the work of dance, and the limits of dance’s meaning-production set by the theme of bodily movement’s “ephemerality” and “disappearance.” After critically examining the approaches of Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière in whose philosophies dance is relegated to a metaphor or, even worse, to an ahistorical conduit for a general ontology, the author makes a case for another movement of thought that arises in dance practice and is at the same time philosophical, rooted in Spinoza’s (and Deleuze’s) principle of expression. Demonstrating how choreographers, like Xavier Le Roy and Jonathan Burrows, create by “posing problems,” Cvejić presents a theory of “expressive concepts,” whereby choreography contributes to a philosophical rethinking of the relationship between the body, movement and time. This points to the new prospects of a kind of “dance-philosophy,” in which the epistemic hierarchy is reversed: the stake is no longer in what philosophy could do for dance, but how an experimental, radically pragmatic orientation in dance offers a practical framework for theorizing perception, concept-formation and other philosophical issues.

Process Ontology Specification for Enhancing the Process Compliance of a Measurement and Evaluation Strategy


 
 
 In this paper, we specify a generic ontology for the process domain considering the related state-of-the-art research literature. As a result, the recently built process ontology contributes to enrich semantically the terms for the (previously developed) measurement and evaluation domain ontology by means of stereotypes. One of the underlying hypothesis in this research is that the generic ontology for process can be seen as a reusable artifact which can be used to enrich semantically not only the measurement and evaluation domain ontology but also to other domains involved in different organizational endeavors. For instance, for the measurement domain, now is explicit that the measurement term has the semantic of task, the measure term has the meaning of outcome, and the metric term has the semantic of method, from the process terminological base standpoint. The augmented conceptual framework, i.e. measurement and evaluation concepts plus process concepts, has also a positive impact on the GOCAME (Goal-Oriented Context-Aware Measurement and Evaluation) strategy capabilities since ensures terminological uniformity, consistency and verifiability to its process and method specifications. In order to illustrate how the augmented conceptual framework impacts on the verifiability of GOCAME process and method specifications in addition to the consistency and comparability of results in measurement and evaluation projects, an ICT (Information and Communications Technology) security and risk evaluation case study is used.
 
 

Quantum mechanics, strong emergence and ontological non-reducibility

We show that a new interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which the notion of event is defined without reference to measurement or observers, allows to construct a quantum general ontology based on systems, states and events. Unlike the Copenhagen interpretation, it does not resort to elements of a classical ontology. The quantum ontology in turn allows us to recognize that a typical behavior of quantum systems exhibits strong emergence and ontological non-reducibility. Such phenomena are not exceptional but natural, and are rooted in the basic mathematical structure of quantum mechanics.

Emotions ontology for collaborative modelling and learning of emotional responses

Emotions-aware applications are getting a lot of attention as a way to improve the user experience, and also thanks to increasingly affordable Brain–Computer Interfaces (BCI). Thus, projects collecting emotion-related data are proliferating, like social networks sentiment analysis or tracking students’ engagement to reduce Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) drop out rates. All them require a common way to represent emotions so it can be more easily integrated, shared and reused by applications improving user experience. Due to the complexity of this data, our proposal is to use rich semantic models based on ontology. EmotionsOnto is a generic ontology for describing emotions and their detection and expression systems taking contextual and multimodal elements into account. The ontology has been applied in the context of EmoCS, a project that collaboratively collects emotion common sense and models it using the EmotionsOnto and other ontologies. Currently, emotion input is provided manually by users. However, experiments are being conduced to automatically measure users’s emotional states using Brain–Computer Interfaces.

Rancang Bangun Pembangkit Ontologi dan RDF pada Sistem E-Learning PrimagamaPlus

PrimagamaPlus adalah situs e-Learning Primagama yang berisi resource edukatif diantaranya ebook, video, berita dan artikel edukasi, serta TryOut secara Online. Situs ini sangat bermanfaat bagi siswa dalam belajar. PrimagamaPlus ingin konten yang dimiliki juga dapat dikonsumsi oleh aplikasi atau sistem lain. Oleh Karena itu Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menerapkan penggunaan teknologi web semantik agar konten pembelajaran PrimagamaPlus dapat dimanfaatkan oleh aplikasi-aplikasi lain melalui Internet. Pengembangan program menggunakan web semantik jenis RDF/XML karena skemanya dapat dibuat sendiri menggunakan RDFs dan Ontologi OWL. Library untuk pengembangan web semantik adalah DotNetRDF. Program yang dibuat berupa pembangkit ontologi dan pembangkit RDF untuk setiap konten e-Learning PrimagamaPlus. Ontologi dibuat dengan cara mendefinisikan kelas, datatype properties dan object properties yang akan digunakan untuk pembuatan RDF. Data RDF yang dibangkitkan menggunakan data ontologi sesuai dengan profil masing-masing konten e-Learning. Pembangkit RDF diset aktif saat ada penambahan, perubahan, atau penghapusan konten, agar tidak menambah aktivitas Administrator. Penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa aplikasi di luar PrimagamaPlus dapat lebih mudah menambang konten-konten e-Learning PrimagamaPlus. Setiap halaman PrimagamaPlus yang diakses, maka berkas RDF yang telah dibangkitkan tidak diikutkan di halaman tersebut. Yang ditambahkan hanyalah tag links yang mengacu ke lokasi berkas RDF. Hal ini memudahkan pengguna dan mesin penambang data mengakses konten karena transfer data yang relatif kecil. PrimagamaPlus, the Primagama e-Learning website has education resources consist of ebook, video, education news, article, and online tryout. This website is very useful for students when studying. PrimagamaPlus wants its learning contents can be consumed well machines or applications. So, this research purpose is to implement the use of semantic web technology so that the PrimagamaPlus learning contents can be consumed easily by those applications or machines. The software development use RDF/XML semantic web type because its schema can be costumed in RDFs and OWL ontology. The library for its development is DotNetRDF. The software feature that is built are ontology generator and RDF generator for every PrimagamaPlus e-Learning contents. The ontology is written by defining the classes, datatype properties and object properties that will be used for RDF creation. The RDF data that are created use ontology data apropriated with each e-Learning contents profiles. The RDF generator will run when there are addition, update, or deletion of the contents, so the administrator has no activity addition for this. This research shows that custom mining applications more easily to mine every PrimagamaPlus e-Learning contents. Every accessed PrimagamaPlus page, the RDF data is not added in it. The addition for the page is a links tag that has RDF data url. This condition make the users and mining applications have no transfer data difficulties when downloading the contents.

다양한 IoT 환경에서 상황인지 서비스 제공을 위한 크로스 버티컬 온톨로지 개발

IoT 환경에서 사용자에게 상황인지 서비스를 제공하기 위해서는 상황정보가 필요하다. 이를 위해 센서나 액츄에이터 같은 장치에서 수집된 데이터를 온톨로지를 통해 상황정보로 변환한다. 기존의 상황인지 서비스를 위한 온톨로지는 타겟 서비스를 기반으로 온톨로지를 설계하여 사용자의 요구사항, 서비스 조건, 환경 등이 변하거나 또는 전혀 다른 서비스를 원할 경우 온톨로지를 전반적으로 재설계해야 하는 불편함이 있다. 이러한 점을 극복하기 위해 본 논문에서는 사용자가 장소나 상황에 구애 받지 않고 자신이 원하는 장소에서 원하는 서비스를 정의할 수 있는 크로스 버티컬(Cross-vertical) 온톨로지 모델인 Generic Ontology Models(GOMs)를 제안한다. 또한 IoT 서비스의 데이터 흐름을 나타내는 IoT 서비스 개념 모델과 IoT 서비스를 제공하기 위한 IoT 서비스 환경을 제안하고 제안된 환경에서 GOMs를 이용하여 다양한 서비스 시나리오에 적용해봄으로써 IoT 환경에서 상황인지 서비스가 가능함을 보인다. In the IoT environment, context information is important to provide context service to the user. For this, collected data from devices such as sensors or actuators, converts to context information using the ontology. Because the existing ontologies designed for target service, if the user wants to change the service requirements, service condition, service environment or another service, overall ontology will be redesigned to the changed service. To overcome this difficulty, we propose the cross-vertical ontology model called the Generic Ontology Models(GOMs). It can define the user's desired services without regarding to place and situation. Also, we propose IoT service concept model that represents data flow of the IoT service and IoT service environment. Moreover, as the use case, we show that the proposed GOMs are able to provide the IoT service well.

Model-based approach for optimizing the storage management of bio-repositories

Systematically collected samples of human tissue and fluids (e.g. blood, urine) play a key role in biomedical research. Biomaterial banks aim at collecting such biomaterials systematically and providing long-term availability of samples, which have to be kept constantly frozen at low temperatures. Therefore, storage management has to meet critical constraints in order to maintain high quality of the samples. The project aims at supporting the application of optimization and simulation algorithms for storage management. The approach has to provide means for adapting the algorithms flexibly and systematically to different or changing settings of biomaterial management and, therefore, aims at implementing a model-based framework to specify and run the algorithms.The process of establishing an optimization/simulation model for a given Biomaterial bank supported by the project starts with acquiring separately a model (1) of biomaterial handling and (2) of the optimization or simulation approach. The models for specific situations are derived from generic ontologies. A subsequent model mapping step assigns components representing aspects of biomaterial handling and storage to roles in a suitable optimization or simulation scheme. The mapping then enables the semi-automatic generation of optimization and simulation code. In the case of offline optimization problems, the framework produces program code that can be processed by an existing generic solver for mixed integer optimization programs (Zuse Institute Mathematical Programming Language code to be processed by the solver Solving Constraint Integer Programs). In the case of online problems, i.e., problems with an ongoing production of new information relevant for the optimization, the approach generates Java code suitable for processing by an existing simulation kernel (SimKit).The mapping module has been verified by reproducing a given solution for the Capacitated Facility Problem. Preliminary results of simulation runs show antagonistic effects of sorting bio-specimens by sample type: Sorting decreases the number of freezer opening operations while it increases fragmentation. The project is the first to adopt ontology-based modeling and model mapping for systematically exploring optimization and simulation approaches to biomaterial storage management. The results of simulation runs not only demonstrate the feasibility of the approach, but yield first practical insights (e.g. the effect of sorting samples).

A Disaster Document Classification Technique Using Domain Specific Ontologies

Manual data collection and entry is one of the bottlenecks in conventional disaster management information systems. Time is a critical factor in emergency situations and timely data collection and processing may help in saving several lives. An effective disaster management system needs to collect data from World Wide Web automatically. A prerequisite for data collection process is document classification mechanism to classify a particular document into different categories. Ontologies are formal bodies of knowledge used to capture machine understandable semantics of a domain of interest and have been used successfully to support document classification in various domains. This paper presents an ontology-based document classification technique for automatic data collection in a disaster management system. A general ontology of disasters is used that contains the description of several natural and man-made disasters. The proposed technique augments the conventional classification measures with the ontological knowledge to improve the precision of classification. A preliminary implementation of the proposed technique shows promising results with up to 10% overall improvement in precision when compared with conventional classification methods.