Ontology Engineering Approach Research Articles

Enhanced Agile Methodology for Ontology Development in E-Learning Environments

This study explores the use of agile approaches to the creation of ontologies for e-learning, evaluating the benefits and drawbacks as well as the impact on information display. Traditional strategies conflict with the need to fulfill the ever-evolving expectations of users and adapt to the ever-changing features of e-learning environments. The challenge aims to encourage cooperation and versatility in the creation of ontologies for e-learning through the use of Agile standards. Because they make it simpler to organize relationships and statistics, ontologies are vital elements in e-mastering domain names due to the fact that they permit adaptive knowledge of structures and individualized learning experiences. Agile ontology engineering approaches are proposed as a choice for one’s problems, emphasizing flexibility and response. This study highlights the need to work together with customers and incorporate their input into the advent of ontologies. It notably emphasizes using established feedback loops and cooperation with e-learning platform companies. The sensible usefulness and effectiveness of agile methodology for ontology development (AMOD) in e-learning settings are shown through validation efforts in real-global conditions.

A proposal of conceptual model for Brazilian popular music

PurposeThe term “Brazilian popular music” refers to a varied repertoire of musical styles with a strong connection to local culture. The initiatives of representation of this domain of interest occur through adaptations of generic models and strategies coming from contexts and musical styles that differ from the essential characteristics of the national music. The purpose of this paper is to present a characterization of Brazilian popular music as a conceptual model which supports the communication and analysis of this domain and serves as a reference ontology for various applications in the field of Information Science and others.Design/methodology/approachTo achieve the purpose, a mapping about Brazilian popular music was done from a literature review and a data collection with expert users, based on domain analysis theory. From this characterization, the conceptual model was built using an Ontology Engineering approach. To facilitate understanding, the results were described using a more user-friendly notation.FindingsThe paper presents a conceptual model as a first semantic reference on Brazilian popular music that serves (1) to better understand, communicate and analyze the domain of Brazilian popular music and, (2) to supply some semantic aspects not covered by the adaptations that have been proposed on the literature for musical representation.Originality/valueThe paper adds a new perspective to the understanding of Brazilian popular music and open opportunity to explore other repertoires about popular music.

CargO-S: A pattern-based well-founded legal domain ontology for the traceability of goods in logistic sea corridors

Building legal domain ontologies is a prominent challenge in the ontology engineering community. The ontology builders confront issues such as the complexity of the legal domain, the difficulty of applying existing ontology engineering approaches, and the intention of developing legal models faithful to realities. In this paper, we discuss constructing a well-founded legal domain ontology, named CargO-S, for the traceability of goods in logistic sea corridors. For building CargO-S, a pattern-oriented approach is applied, supported by ontology-driven conceptual modeling, ontology layering, and ontology reuse processes. CargO-S is grounded in the unified foundational ontology UFO by using the ontology-driven conceptual modeling language OntoUML. Besides, ontology layering is proposed to simplify the development process by dividing CargO-S into three layers located at different granularity levels: upper, core, and domain. For building the upper and core layers, conceptual ontology patterns are reused from the foundational ontology UFO and the legal core ontology UFO-L. These patterns are applied, either by extension or analogy with legal rules, for building the domain layer. CargO-S is then validated by implementing the ontology as OWL and SWRL rules. Finally, the performance and the semantic accuracy of CargO-S are evaluated using a dual evaluation approach.

An ontology engineering approach to measuring city education system performance

This paper addresses the problem of how to represent education system measurement definitions and the data used to derive them. ISO 37120 is standard for measuring city performance. It defines 100 indicators of which seven focus on Education. As cities adopt the standard and begin publishing their indicator values, citizens, city bureaucrats and politicians will be able to see how well their education systems perform relative to other cities. Hence, education systems will be subject to greater scrutiny and will have to provide evidence-based explanations for their performance. In order to enable the automated analysis of city performance, four problems must be solved: 1) how are indicator definitions represented? 2) how is the data used to derive an indicator value represented? 3) how is educational system specific knowledge represented, and 4) how is city specific educational system knowledge represented? In this paper we present an Education Ontology designed to represent ISO 37120 education indicators and the information delineated above. The ontology is designed to enable an intelligent agent to perform consistency and root cause analysis of city indicators. It can also be used by cities to publish their education indicators and data, using Semantic Web standards, on their Open Data portals.

Phenotyping clinical trial treatment regimens in cancer: An integrative ontology, artificial intelligence and knowledge engineering approach.

e14054 Background: Matching clinical attributes (i.e. indications, lab tests, treatment regimens) of clinical trial eligibility criteria with real world patient data is extremely challenging. Attribute phenotyping is one of the key components of Trial2Patient, a customized system developed by Sema4 to find patients for clinical trials. Transforming treatment regimens to a standard ontology and encoding drugs with standard nomenclatures will facilitate the semantic retrieval of treatments mentioned in clinical trial criteria. This will also enable the interoperation between different data sources that is often required for fast-learning and scalable healthcare information system. Methods: Free text containing treatment regimen/medication terms were extracted and preprocessed from three sources: 1) clinical trials listed in a commercial database citeline.com, 2) clinical trials listed in clinicaltrials.gov, and 3) National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) Guidelines. The regimen terms such as neoadjuvant therapy for non-small cell lung cancer, checkpoint inhibitor, EGFR inhibitor, androgen deprivation therapy (ADT), among many others, were profiled by AI methods (i.e. pattern reorganization and rule-based) and knowledge engineering via Sema4’s in-house knowledge base (CAV), Pharmaprojects in citline.com and NCCN Guidelines. The drugs related to each regimen were identified and mapped to RxCUI via RxNorm ontology. Results: We identified 76 regimen terms for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), small cell lung cancer (SCLC) and prostate cancer (e.g. PD-L1 ≥1% nonsquamous NSCLC, bone antiresorptive therapy for M1 castration resistant prostate cancer), and 14,476 drug-category pair (e.g. pembrolizumab is a PD-1 inhibitor, pembrolizumab is used as the third line and beyond systemic therapy for M1 CRPC). All drugs identified were mapped to RxCUI for real world patient matching. Conclusions: This approach systematically extracted and normalized regimens and medications mentioned in clinical trials in NSCLC, SCLC and prostate cancer to standard codes. These standardized data can be used in mapping treatment histories of a patient to the eligibility criteria for clinical studies or for identifying studies relevant to a patient. The outcome of profiling cancer treatment regimens through standard ontology RxNorm may be particularly valuable in cancer studies based on real-world evidence.

Ontology‐driven perspective of CFRaaS

AbstractA Cloud Forensic Readiness as a Service (CFRaaS) model allows an environment to preemptively accumulate relevant potential digital evidence (PDE) which may be needed during a post‐event response process. The benefit of applying a CFRaaS model in a cloud environment, is that, it is designed to prevent the modification/tampering of the cloud architectures or the infrastructure during the reactive process, which if it could, may end up having far‐reaching implications. The authors of this article present the reactive process as a very costly exercise when the infrastructure must be reprogrammed every time the process is conducted. This may hamper successful investigation from the forensic experts and law enforcement agencies perspectives. The CFRaaS model, in its current state, has not been presented in a way that can help to classify or visualize the different types of potential evidence in all the cloud deployable models, and this may limit the expectations of what or how the required PDE may be collected. To address this problem, the article presents the CFRaaS from a holistic ontology‐driven perspective, which allows the forensic experts to be able to apply the CFRaaS based on its simplicity of the concepts, relationship or semantics between different form of potential evidence, as well as how the security of a digital environment being investigated could be upheld. The CFRaaS in this context follows a fundamental ontology engineering approach that is based on the classical Resource Description Framework. The proposed ontology‐driven approach to CFRaaS is, therefore, a knowledge‐base that uses layer‐dependencies, which could be an essential toolkit for digital forensic examiners and other stakeholders in cloud‐security. The implementation of this approach could further provide a platform to develop other knowledge base components for cloud forensics and security.This article is categorized under: Digital and Multimedia Science > Cloud Forensics Digital and Multimedia Science > Cyber Threat Intelligence Digital and Multimedia Science > Multimedia Forensics

The development of an ontology model for early identification of children with specific learning disabilities

<span lang="EN-US">Ontology-based knowledge representation is explored in special education environment as not much attention has been given to the area of specific learning disabilities such as dyslexia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia. Therefore, this paper aims to capture the knowledge in special education domain, represent the knowledge using ontology-based approach and make it efficient for early identification of children who might have specific learning disabilities. In this paper, the step-by-step development process of the ontology is presented by following the five phases of ontological engineering approach, which consists of specification, conceptualization, formalization, implementation, and maintenance. The details of the ontological model’s content and structure is built and the applicability of the ontology for early identification and recommendation is demonstrated.</span>

An Ontological Approach towards Dialoguebased Information Visualization System: Quran Corpus for Juz' Amma

This paper presents a corpus that offers rich and authentic knowledge for Juz' Amma using the ontological engineering approach. The reason of the study conducted is because of lack of understanding of Juz' Amma in the form of listing result. At the same time, the listing result does not provide pictorial tidings for clustering the listing result. Therefore, the corpus covers knowledge from various authentic sources, including translation, annotation of keywords, tafsir, and related hadiths for every verse in English and Malay. The ontology is engineered and designed to effectively utilize the authentic knowledge extracted from the corpus intended to serve a dialogue-based information visualization system for Quranic text. A standard ontology engineering methodology was applied for developing the ontology. After creation, the ontology was evaluated and was found to fulfill the goals for which it was developed. The corpus and ontology are hoped to aid various semantic applications related to Quranic text in the future.

Supporting collaboration in interdisciplinary research of water–energy–food nexus by means of ontology engineering

Study regionWe do not target particular region, but we implement the workshop experiments towards the researcher groups in the laboratories. Study focusWhen we discuss hydrology in the context of water–energy–food nexus, the discussion will inevitably include interdisciplinary contents. For example, in the impact assessment of groundwater use we need understanding whole mechanisms composed of all kinds of causal linkages from the groundwater concept or the groundwater issues. In this article we focus on ontology engineering, which is one of the base technologies in Semantic Web technology, as a method providing common terms, concepts, and semantics. New hydrological insightsWe discuss the effectiveness of ontology engineering approach in the process of collaborative research, and propose the way of ontology use contributing to interdisciplinary research through the experimental workshops of research development.The introduction of ontology engineering approach will enable us to share a common language and a common theoretical basis. But the development of the new method based on ontology engineering is necessary. For example, knowledge structuring according to each perspective of researchers and simple figure accompanied with a reasoned argument in the background are the directions of tool development.

An Ontology Engineering Approach to User Profiling for Virtual Tours of Museums and Galleries

This paper describes a study of the development of a hierarchical ontology for producing and maintaining personalized profiles to improve the experience of visitors to virtual art galleries and museums. The paper begins by describing some of the features of virtual exhibitions and offers examples of virtual tours that the reader may wish to examine in more detail. The paper then discusses the ontology engineering (OE) approach and domain modelling languages (e.g. KACTUS, SENSUS and METHONTOLOGY). It then follows a basic OE approach to define classes for a cultural heritage virtual tour and to produce a Visitor Profile Ontology that is hierarchical and has static and dynamic elements. It concludes by suggesting ways in which the ontology may be automated to provide a richer, more immersive personalized visitor experience.

Formal Specification of the Framework for NSSA

As the computer network has evolved to provide the user many services, the attacks on these networks to disrupt the services and to gain access to resources has also evolved. New entities in form of services, hardware, network protocols etc. are being added to the network, which is leading to new ways to attack the network. The complexity of the system is increasing so fast that it is becoming increasingly difficult for network administrator to comprehend the situation and react in an appropriate manner. Situation becomes more complex as there is no uniform terminology. Though serious efforts in form of Common Vulnerability Enumeration (CVE), Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE), Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC) etc. has been made, still a long way is to go. In this paper we have proposed a formal specification of the framework for network security situational awareness (NSSA) using ontological engineering approach. We have modeled a computer network by modeling its components i.e. hardware, software, services using ontology. Also vulnerabilities and attacks on these computers are modeled. We populate our ontology with various instances of vulnerabilities, CVSS scores, attacks and possible services in the network. Knowledge representation methods are used in order to provide Description Logic reasoning and inference over network security status concept. Secondly we propose an ontology based system which predicts probable attacks using inference and information provided by the environment.

A semantic driven approach for requirements consistency verification

Consistency and completeness are the main quality attributes to be guaranteed in software development. Software engineering community has largely studied consistency, together with completeness, in the last decade, to improve quality of software products and to reduce costs. Different approaches have been defined to detect and manage inconsistencies in software life cycle. The adoption of ontologies seems promising to achieve the proper level of formalism and to argue on quality properties. This paper presents a survey of the main approaches to consistency in different tasks of software engineering, focusing on the requirement engineering tasks, and proposes an ontological engineering approach to detect inconsistencies among a set of requirements written in natural language.

A fast and economic ontology engineering approach towards improving capability matching: Application to an online engineering collaborative platform

Fulfilling needs through internal and external resources is a key business requirement. To better enable this, description of both needs and resources, using a common domain language is required. Using techniques from social network analysis (SNA) this paper describes a SENSUS-based methodology which generates domain ontology that can provide the breadth and depth of coverage required for automated need and resource matching systems. The mechanism described also enriches the semantic relationships in the generated ontology to form a network structure. This enables concept investigation to be undertaken from multiple perspectives, with fuzzy matching and enhanced reasoning through directional weight-specified relationships. The methodology was used to derive an ontology for engineering and tested against a traditionally derived and structured ontology. The methodology has the flexibility and utility to be of benefit in a wide range need and resource matching business applications.

Ontological Engineering Approach Towards Botnet Detection in Network Forensics

The abundance in the usage of Internet, in every arena of life from social to personal, commercial to domestic and other aspects of life as well, leads the rise in cybercrime at an upsetting speed. More illegal activities as a result of cyber crime, reason to tempts many network attacks and threats. Network forensics is the branch of fornesics that deals in the detection of network attacks. Botnet is one of the most common attacks, but hazardos. It  is a network of hacked computers It  involves the capturing, storing and then analysis of the network packets, in order to identify the source of the attack.  Various methods based on this approach for botnet detection are suggested in literature but there is no generalized method to represent the basic methodology used by any of the botnet detection method. With such guidelines, the comparison among the various implementations, a roadmap for the new implementation, development of reusable implementations can be addressed. Accordingly, there is a requirement of a generic framework that can characterize the general methodology followed by any of the botnet detection methods. This paper, review various prevalent methods of botnet detection to extract commonalities among them. A global model for the detection of botnets is represented as ontology. Ontology is used as a means of knowledge representation. The botnet ontology is represented using Web Ontology Language (OWL). OWL is used because it is a language with layered architecture and high expressive power.Â

Querying phenotype-genotype relationships on patient datasets using semantic web technology: the example of cerebrotendinous xanthomatosis

BackgroundSemantic Web technology can considerably catalyze translational genetics and genomics research in medicine, where the interchange of information between basic research and clinical levels becomes crucial. This exchange involves mapping abstract phenotype descriptions from research resources, such as knowledge databases and catalogs, to unstructured datasets produced through experimental methods and clinical practice. This is especially true for the construction of mutation databases. This paper presents a way of harmonizing abstract phenotype descriptions with patient data from clinical practice, and querying this dataset about relationships between phenotypes and genetic variants, at different levels of abstraction.MethodsDue to the current availability of ontological and terminological resources that have already reached some consensus in biomedicine, a reuse-based ontology engineering approach was followed. The proposed approach uses the Ontology Web Language (OWL) to represent the phenotype ontology and the patient model, the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) to bridge the gap between phenotype descriptions and clinical data, and the Semantic Query Web Rule Language (SQWRL) to query relevant phenotype-genotype bidirectional relationships. The work tests the use of semantic web technology in the biomedical research domain named cerebrotendinous xanthomatosis (CTX), using a real dataset and ontologies.ResultsA framework to query relevant phenotype-genotype bidirectional relationships is provided. Phenotype descriptions and patient data were harmonized by defining 28 Horn-like rules in terms of the OWL concepts. In total, 24 patterns of SWQRL queries were designed following the initial list of competency questions. As the approach is based on OWL, the semantic of the framework adapts the standard logical model of an open world assumption.ConclusionsThis work demonstrates how semantic web technologies can be used to support flexible representation and computational inference mechanisms required to query patient datasets at different levels of abstraction. The open world assumption is especially good for describing only partially known phenotype-genotype relationships, in a way that is easily extensible. In future, this type of approach could offer researchers a valuable resource to infer new data from patient data for statistical analysis in translational research. In conclusion, phenotype description formalization and mapping to clinical data are two key elements for interchanging knowledge between basic and clinical research.

Ontological Engineering Approach towards Trust Oriented Security Framework for Adhoc Networks

Conventionally, user authentication and access control mechanisms would be almost enough, to handle security for stand-alone computers and small networks. Ad hoc networks are illustrated by multi-hop wireless connectivity and recurrently changing network topology which have made them infrastructure less. Adding trust to the existing security infrastructures would improvise the security of these environments. Describing trust relations and their sub-components using ontologies, creates a methodology and mechanism in order to efficiently design and engineer trust networks. This is going to be used as a service for providing trust for ad hoc network at any level i.e. routing, authentication or access control. A trust oriented security framework for adhoc network using ontological engineering approach is proposed by modeling ad hoc network, the OLSR (Optimized Link State Routing) protocol and trust model as OWL (Ontology Web language) ontologies, which are integrated using Jena. In this model, a trustor can calculate its trust about trustee and use the calculated trust values to make decisions depending on the context of the application or interaction about granting or rejecting it. A number of experiments with a possible implementation of suggested framework are performed to make out the characteristics of the trust model and its effect on the ad hoc network operations.

Automatic, context-specific generation of Gene Ontology slims

BackgroundThe use of ontologies to control vocabulary and structure annotation has added value to genome-scale data, and contributed to the capture and re-use of knowledge across research domains. Gene Ontology (GO) is widely used to capture detailed expert knowledge in genomic-scale datasets and as a consequence has grown to contain many terms, making it unwieldy for many applications. To increase its ease of manipulation and efficiency of use, subsets called GO slims are often created by collapsing terms upward into more general, high-level terms relevant to a particular context. Creation of a GO slim currently requires manipulation and editing of GO by an expert (or community) familiar with both the ontology and the biological context. Decisions about which terms to include are necessarily subjective, and the creation process itself and subsequent curation are time-consuming and largely manual.ResultsHere we present an objective framework for generating customised ontology slims for specific annotated datasets, exploiting information latent in the structure of the ontology graph and in the annotation data. This framework combines ontology engineering approaches, and a data-driven algorithm that draws on graph and information theory. We illustrate this method by application to GO, generating GO slims at different information thresholds, characterising their depth of semantics and demonstrating the resulting gains in statistical power.ConclusionsOur GO slim creation pipeline is available for use in conjunction with any GO-annotated dataset, and creates dataset-specific, objectively defined slims. This method is fast and scalable for application to other biomedical ontologies.

Geospatial metadata extraction from product description document applying methods from ontology engineering

Metadata creation is a bottleneck in European Union (EU) INSPIRE Directive. Firstly the paper presents results from a conformance test conducted at Swedish Land Survey. The results of the testing show a gap between the current statuses of metadata and INSPIRE demands. Secondly the paper introduces an ontology-engineering approach to support extraction of metadata from annotated text documents. This approach can be used for generating metadata in Ontology Web Language (OWL) format that can be reused in a Geography Markup Language (GML) documents instance. Catalogue service of the Swedish geoportal to INSPIRE can employ this approach to generate dataset-level metadata.

An ontology engineering approach to the realization of theory-driven group formation

One of the main difficulties during the design of collaborative learning activities is adequate group formation. In any type of collaboration, group formation plays a critical role in the learners’ acceptance of group activities, as well as the success of the collaborative learning process. Nevertheless, to propose both an effective and pedagogically sound group formation is a complex issue due to multiple factors that influence group arrangement. The current (and previous) learner’s knowledge and skills, the roles and strategies used by learners to interact among themselves, and the teacher’s preferences are some examples of factors to be considered while forming groups. To identify which factors are essential (or desired) in effective group formation, a well-structured and formalized representation of collaborative learning processes, supported by a strong pedagogical basis, is desirable. Thus, the main goal of this paper is to present an ontology that works as a framework based on learning theories that facilitate group formation and collaborative learning design. The ontology provides the necessary formalization to represent collaborative learning and its processes, while learning theories provide support in making pedagogical decisions such as gathering learners in groups and planning the scenario where the collaboration will take place. Although the use of learning theories to support collaborative learning is open for criticism, we identify that they provide important information which can be useful in allowing for more effective learning. To validate the usefulness and effectiveness of this approach, we use this ontology to form and run group activities carried out by four instructors and 20 participants. The experiment was utilized as a proof-of-concept and the results suggest that our ontological framework facilitates the effective design of group activities, and can positively affect the performance of individuals during group learning.

An ontological approach to designers’ idea explanation style: Towards supporting the sharing of kansei-ideas in textile design

In human-centered design activities, each designer has his or her own ideas about emotional aspect (or kansei) of new products. It is a key issue to share this vague kansei-idea appropriately at the earliest stage of design activities. This paper shows a novel ontological engineering approach to support kansei-idea sharing. The approach focuses on an idea explanation style as the wisdom of the design team. Ontological engineering has been making contributions to systematize knowledge and vocabulary by modeling them. Needless to say, it is difficult to model the vague kansei-idea itself. However, if the modeled object is shifted from the kansei-idea to the kansei-idea explanation style, it can provide the benefit of modeling. We investigated the effectiveness of the ontological engineering approach, and concluded that to construct an ontological framework of designers’ explanations is especially useful regarding these points: clarification of the essence of the explanation style, discovery of problems in explanations, and analyzing difficulties in acquiring explanation style for novices. From the investigation, what we can support and how a support system should be designed became clear. Furthermore, we built a kansei-idea sharing support system, and obtained the results of its initial trials.