Ontology Validation Research Articles

Transplantologia a ontologia – Intruz Jeana-Luka Nancy’ego

This article presents an analysis of Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay L’Intrus (2002), a personal reflection on illness and the experience of heart transplantation. The analysis combines two approaches (though the first of them is given more prominence). Firstly, L’Intrus is treated as philosophical-literary pathography, where the reader’s attention is engrossed by the lived experience of illness and its linguistic representation – a sophisticated, elliptical, metaphorical style which exposes the altering intrusiveness of both the med-ical condition and the treatment (implanting an ‘alien’ organ). Secondly, L’Intrus is read in the context of Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophical reflection proper. The essay’s linguistic manipulation of singular and plural are interpreted as an echo of his philosophical position put forth in Être singulier pluriel. The totally individual experience of illness and suffering exposes the underlying ontological validity of ‘being-with’ others. The in-sight that there is no being (Dasein) without ‘being-with’ (Mitsein) leads in effect to a revision of a number of key philosophical concepts like the Self / the Other, the subject, identity, nature and technology (ecotechnology).

Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP): 3D Human Reference Atlas Construction and Usage.

The Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP) aims to construct a reference 3D structural, cellular, and molecular atlas of the healthy adult human body. The HuBMAP Data Portal (https://portal.hubmapconsortium.org) serves experimental datasets and supports data processing, search, filtering, and visualization. The Human Reference Atlas (HRA) Portal (https://humanatlas.io) provides open access to atlas data, code, procedures, and instructional materials. Experts from more than 20 consortia are collaborating to construct the HRA's Common Coordinate Framework (CCF), knowledge graphs, and tools that describe the multiscale structure of the human body (from organs and tissues down to cells, genes, and biomarkers) and to use the HRA to understand changes that occur at each of these levels with aging, disease, and other perturbations. The 6th release of the HRA v2.0 covers 36 organs with 4,499 unique anatomical structures, 1,195 cell types, and 2,089 biomarkers (e.g., genes, proteins, lipids) linked to ontologies and 2D/3D reference objects. New experimental data can be mapped into the HRA using (1) three cell type annotation tools (e.g., Azimuth) or (2) validated antibody panels (OMAPs), or (3) by registering tissue data spatially. This paper describes the HRA user stories, terminology, data formats, ontology validation, unified analysis workflows, user interfaces, instructional materials, application programming interface (APIs), flexible hybrid cloud infrastructure, and previews atlas usage applications.

Exploring the intersection of utilitarianism and sustainability in business: A conceptual analysis

Purpose: This research aims to elucidate the benefits commercial entities strive to accrue by implementing sustainability practices, using a conceptual analysis framework to probe into the anticipated benefits underpinning sustainability adoption. Methodology: The study employs a comprehensive literature review to define and establish a framework for utilitarianism and sustainability, focusing on their relationship and implications within the business context. Results: The research findings indicate that sustainability practices can considerably augment the utilitarian objectives of businesses. Energy efficiency initiatives, for instance, can enhance profitability by curtailing energy costs and simultaneously alleviating environmental impacts. Social responsibility endeavours can amplify brand value, solidifying customer loyalty. Elevated employee satisfaction and engagement can foster heightened productivity and competitiveness. Theoretical contribution: This study contributes to the existing body of literature by critically examining the definitions of critical terms and interrogating the ontological validity of the assumed linkage between sustainability initiatives and the anticipated benefits. It also offers a framework illustrating how businesses might integrate the principles of sustainability and utilitarianism, setting a foundation for further exploration of this theme. Practical implications: The research provides valuable insights for businesses seeking to harmonize their activities with environmental, social, and economic impacts in the pursuit of sustainability, while simultaneously aiming to maximize benefits. It underscores the importance of maintaining a delicate equilibrium between sustainability and utilitarianism, as the incorporation of sustainability principles can assist businesses in achieving their profit and benefit creation objectives, thereby fortifying their prospects for enduring success.

Development and validation of the early warning system scores ontology

BackgroundClinical early warning scoring systems, have improved patient outcomes in a range of specializations and global contexts. These systems are used to predict patient deterioration. A multitude of patient-level physiological decompensation data has been made available through the widespread integration of early warning scoring systems within EHRs across national and international health care organizations. These data can be used to promote secondary research. The diversity of early warning scoring systems and various EHR systems is one barrier to secondary analysis of early warning score data. Given that early warning score parameters are varied, this makes it difficult to query across providers and EHR systems. Moreover, mapping and merging the parameters is challenging. We develop and validate the Early Warning System Scores Ontology (EWSSO), representing three commonly used early warning scores: the National Early Warning Score (NEWS), the six-item modified Early Warning Score (MEWS), and the quick Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (qSOFA) to overcome these problems.MethodsWe apply the Software Development Lifecycle Framework—conceived by Winston Boyce in 1970—to model the activities involved in organizing, producing, and evaluating the EWSSO. We also follow OBO Foundry Principles and the principles of best practice for domain ontology design, terms, definitions, and classifications to meet BFO requirements for ontology building.ResultsWe developed twenty-nine new classes, reused four classes and four object properties to create the EWSSO. When we queried the data our ontology-based process could differentiate between necessary and unnecessary features for score calculation 100% of the time. Further, our process applied the proper temperature conversions for the early warning score calculator 100% of the time.ConclusionsUsing synthetic datasets, we demonstrate the EWSSO can be used to generate and query health system data on vital signs and provide input to calculate the NEWS, six-item MEWS, and qSOFA. Future work includes extending the EWSSO by introducing additional early warning scores for adult and pediatric patient populations and creating patient profiles that contain clinical, demographic, and outcomes data regarding the patient.

Ontology-based case study management towards bridging training and actual investigation gaps in digital forensics

The training programs in digital forensics have contributed many case study models to guide digital forensic analyses. However, they only account for a small number of real cases and they are usually too abstract while actual cybercrime investigations are more diverse and complex. This gap leads to difficulties in giving immediate and straightforward actions for law enforcement during cybercrime investigations. In this paper, we propose an ontology-based knowledge map model, which is a foundation model for building a case study management system for Digital Forensic Intelligence (DFINT) and Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) in digital forensics. The main idea of this proposed model is to encode specific training cases of cybercrime into knowledge map representations, then the system uses the knowledge from the ontology to provide more information on the context and enrich them to match actual cybercrime scenes. Therefore, this approach can be used to bridge the gap between training case studies and the actual investigation environment. To illustrate our approach, we build a DFOSINT ontology for DFINT and OSINT domain; develop a prototype of the case study management system, and evaluate it in two aspects, ontology validation and case study validation with existing case studies of digital investigations.

An ontological assessment proposal for architectural outputs of generative adversarial network

PurposeThis study presents an ontological approach to assess the architectural outputs of generative adversarial networks. This paper aims to assess the performance of the generative adversarial network in representing building knowledge.Design/methodology/approachThe proposed ontological assessment consists of five steps. These are, respectively, creating an architectural data set, developing ontology for the architectural data set, training the You Only Look Once object detection with labels within the proposed ontology, training the StyleGAN algorithm with the images in the data set and finally, detecting the ontological labels and calculating the ontological relations of StyleGAN-generated pixel-based architectural images. The authors propose and calculate ontological identity and ontological inclusion metrics to assess the StyleGAN-generated ontological labels. This study uses 300 bay window images as an architectural data set for the ontological assessment experiments.FindingsThe ontological assessment provides semantic-based queries on StyleGAN-generated architectural images by checking the validity of the building knowledge representation. Moreover, this ontological validity reveals the building element label-specific failure and success rates simultaneously.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the assessment process of the generative adversarial networks through ontological validity checks rather than only conducting pixel-based similarity checks; semantic-based queries can introduce the GAN-generated, pixel-based building elements into the architecture, engineering and construction industry.

Personalized ontology and deep training tree‐based optimal gated recurrent unit‐recurrent neural network for prediction of students' behavior

SummaryDigital libraries are now widely used by students all around the world due to the hassle‐free services it offers in the form of digitized study materials, ebooks, multimedia content and so forth. However, to increase user satisfaction and allegiance, a personalized digital library needs to be deployed to offer customized services to the users. To accomplish this objective, this article presents a novel scheme to design personalized digital libraries via the usage of the Protégé editor and machine learning techniques. The Protégé 4.3 tool is used to generate the digital library ontologies and identify the interrelated concepts. Domain knowledge acquisition, ontology organization, ontology elaboration, ensuring the consistency of the information, and ontology validation. The gated recurrent unit‐recurrent neural network (GRU‐RNN) with a deep training tree (DTT) is used to predict the different user behavior styles such as cognitive behavior, learning speed behavior, sedentary behavior, and aggressive behavior. The DTT is mainly incorporated to overcome the vanishing gradient issue associated with the GRU‐RNN and used in the place of gradient‐based optimization. A black widow optimization approach is employed to update the weights of the GRU‐RNN network in order to increase its accuracy. The efficiency of the proposed methodology is analyzed by using different performance metrics such as F‐score, accuracy, loss, precision, and recall scores. The results show that the personalized digital library created can be efficient in terms of usability.

METHODOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES OF THE ACTIVITY-PHENOMENOLOGICAL CONCEPT IN THE STUDY OF SOCIAL MECHANISMS FOR FORMING TRUST IN TRANSFORMING ECONOMIC RELATIONS

The purpose of the research. The article substantiates the methodological principles of studying the social mechanisms of trust formation in transforming economic relations, synthesized in the activity-phenomenological approach. Social and political global challenges that affect trust in society, including those related to the dynamics of world economic indicators, are analyzed. As a conceptual basis for defining the concept of trust, the authors rely on the studies of E. Giddens, N. Luhmann, F. Fukuyama, P. Sztompka. The scientific novelty of the study is the clarification of the concept of social mechanisms for the formation of trust. These are reproducible stable forms of optimization of social relations, their main significance is in the integration of social practices and institutions. Results. The authors propose to analyze two types of trust models in transforming economic relations - institutional and subject-oriented trust. The authors rely on the activity-phenomenological approach in the theories of E. Husserl, A. Schutz, M. Wartofsky, G.P. Shchedrovitsky, L. Wittgenstein. Therefore, they propose the following principles for studying the social mechanisms of trust formation: ontological validity, ecological validity, representativeness and epistemological validity. The main methodological difficulties in the study of trust may arise due to insufficient attention to contextuality in trust models, including latent processes in the economy associated with such phenomena as protectionism or corruption. Therefore, attention is focused on the need to typify trust models depending on cultural historical conditions and the effects of economic and political challenges that manifest themselves in these conditions.

Developing a Dietary Lifestyle Ontology to Improve the Interoperability of Dietary Data: Proof-of-Concept Study

BackgroundDietary habits offer crucial information on one's health and form a considerable part of the patient-generated health data. Dietary data are collected through various channels and formats; thus, interoperability is a significant challenge to reusing this type of data. The vast scope of dietary concepts and the colloquial expression style add difficulty to standardizing the data. The interoperability issues of dietary data can be addressed through Common Data Elements with metadata annotation to some extent. However, making culture-specific dietary habits and questionnaire-based dietary assessment data interoperable still requires substantial efforts.ObjectiveThe main goal of this study was to address the interoperability challenge of questionnaire-based dietary data from different cultural backgrounds by combining ontological curation and metadata annotation of dietary concepts. Specifically, this study aimed to develop a Dietary Lifestyle Ontology (DILON) and demonstrate the improved interoperability of questionnaire-based dietary data by annotating its main semantics with DILON.MethodsBy analyzing 1158 dietary assessment data elements (367 in Korean and 791 in English), 515 dietary concepts were extracted and used to construct DILON. To demonstrate the utility of DILON in addressing the interoperability challenges of questionnaire-based multicultural dietary data, we developed 10 competency questions that asked to identify data elements sharing the same dietary topics and assessment properties. We instantiated 68 data elements on dietary habits selected from Korean and English questionnaires and annotated them with DILON to answer the competency questions. We translated the competency questions into Semantic Query-Enhanced Web Rule Language and reviewed the query results for accuracy.ResultsDILON was built with 262 concept classes and validated with ontology validation tools. A small overlap (72 concepts) in the concepts extracted from the questionnaires in 2 languages indicates that we need to pay closer attention to representing culture-specific dietary concepts. The Semantic Query-Enhanced Web Rule Language queries reflecting the 10 competency questions yielded correct results.ConclusionsEnsuring the interoperability of dietary lifestyle data is a demanding task due to its vast scope and variations in expression. This study demonstrated that we could improve the interoperability of dietary data generated in different cultural contexts and expressed in various styles by annotating their core semantics with DILON.

Enabling Traceability in Agri-Food Supply Chains Using an Ontological Approach

Abstract Traceability of food products to their sources is critical for quick responses to food emergencies. US law now requires stakeholders in the agri-food supply chain to support traceability by tracking food materials they acquire and sell. However, having the complete and consistent information needed to quickly investigate sources and identify affected material has proven difficult. There are multiple reasons that food traceability is a challenging task, including diversity of stakeholders and their lexicons, standards, tools, and methods; unwillingness to expose information about internal operations; lack of a common understanding of the steps in a supply chain; and incompleteness of data. The objective of this work is to address the traceability challenge by developing a formal ontology that can provide a shared and common understanding of the traceability model across all stakeholders in bulk food supply chains. A formal ontology can support semantic mediation, data integration, and data exploration, thus improving the intelligence and reliability of trace and track process. The Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) procedures and principles are employed in the development of the supply chain traceability ontology. Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is selected as the top-level ontology. A bottom-up approach is also adopted in a sense that a real use case related to the bulk grain domain is selected to be used for requirements definition and ontology validation. A software tool for visualization of the traceability graph is developed to validate the developed ontology based on simulated data. The test and validation results indicate that the developed ontology has the expressivity needed to represent the semantics of traceability data models within the scope of the selected use case. Also, it was observed that the developed supply chain traceability tool can effectively facilitate the track and trace process through visualizing the Resource Description Framework (RDF) triples, thus eliminating the need to formulate complex SPARQL queries for information retrievals.

Ontology Service Center: A Datahub for Ontology Application

With the growth of data-oriented research in humanities, a large number of research datasets have been created and published through web services. However, how to discover, integrate and reuse these distributed heterogeneous research datasets is a challenging task. Ontology is the soul between series digital humanities resources, which provides a good way for people to discover and understand these datasets. With the release of more and more linked open data and knowledge bases, a large number of ontologies have been produced at the same time. These ontologies have different publishing formats, consumption patterns, and interactions ways, which are not conductive to the user’s understanding of the datasets and the reuse of the ontologies. The Ontology Service Center platform consists of Ontology Query Center and Ontology Validation Center, mainly using linked data and ontology-based technologies. The Ontology Query Center realizes the functions of ontology publishing, querying, data interaction and online browsing, while the Ontology Validation Center can verify the status of using certain ontologies in the linked datasets. The empirical part of the paper uses the Confucius portrait as an example of how OSC can be used in the semantic annotation of images. In a word, the purpose of this paper is to construct the applied ecology of ontology to promote the development of knowledge graphs and the spread of ontology.

THE SPECIFICS OF ARGUMENTATIVE DISCOURSE REPRESENTATION IN THE PREFACE TO A SHORT NOVEL BY ANDRE GIDE "THE IMMORALIST"

The article represents the experience of interpreting the author’s preface (AP) of one of the most significant pieces of world literature as an actual integrative philological problem. It shows the logic of the transition from literary issues (“pure novel”) to the linguistic aspect of the study. The object of study is the author’s preface as a genre of artistic discourse (AD). The purpose of the study is to identify the elements that determine the specifics of the implementation of the functions of the mini-text. The novelty of the work is the study of the preface as a compositional element of the work within the argumentative aspect. The author’s comprises the application of the author’s own model to the object of analysis. This model includes the categories of argumentative space (epistemic context, causality, modality), as well as a dual understanding of argumentation -- in its narrow (as a process of outing forward arguments) and broad (as a constant, ontological validity) meanings. In a narrow sense, argumentation finds expression in various forms: reasoning as a type of text; cognitive elements of the argumentative process in discourse (hypothesis, concessive, clarification); various syntactic techniques – “argumentative balance”, double negation, parallel constructions. The conclusion is made about the correlation between narrow and broad types of understanding of argumentation based on the unity of three concepts – “explanation – evaluation – comprehension”. “Explanation” and “evaluation” in the narrow sense characterize the argumentative process (“for” and “against”), and in its broad sense they manifest objectivity based on distance aspect. “Comprehension” in the unity of two previous stages indicates the specifics of the implementation of the intention to “prove”, the absence of which – in the beginning and within the ending – creates the framework of the preface. In a broad sense, the analyzed part of a novel is characterized as a genre that performs not an influencing, but an orienting function to understand the creative credo of an objective / unbiased writer. This is facilitated by obvious flexibility of dialogical relations between the participants of the discourse – a great French author and his potential (hereinafter – real) readers, who are able to become equal partners in constructing a relevant picture of the world for themselves. The conclusion is drawn about the position of the author as an artist who is able to engage the maximum number of readers in the dialogue: it can be perceived in two ways – as a withdrawal of the author from his artistic space and as an invitation to a mutual journey.

Semantic Modeling of Events Using Linked Open Data

Significant happenings in terms of spatio-temporal factors are called events. In the digital age, these events and their associated features are scattered in various databases on the Internet. The event data are in heterogeneous formats, which are often not machine-readable. This leads to a lack of unification of event-related knowledge across different domains and results in a research gap in terms of event modeling and representation. Specialized event models are needed to overcome this gap and integrate relevant information of different similar events occurring worldwide. Our research explores the problem of heterogeneity in specialized event modeling and takes modeling for refugee registration and repatriation events as a case study. Our research explores the problem of heterogeneity at the data level and proposes a solution to this problem in the field of refugee registration and repatriation events. Considering refugee migration is one of the biggest crises in the world. The proposed model is designed according to Semantic Web standards to ensure reusability and machine readability. The project uses Protégé to model classes and ontology. Our ontology is called OntoEvent ontology and Karma is used for data mapping over ontology. Heterogeneity for the same concepts collected through the internet and through UNHCR (reports, excel sheets) is analyzed and resolved during the data modeling phase. As a result of this research, a timeline is designed to visualize events over time, along with a semantic data model and Linked Open Data representation of refugee data that we believe is of global significance. The W3C Ontology Validation Service has successfully validated the proposed OntoEvent ontology.

“Onto-Computer-Project”, a Computer Project Domain Ontology : Construction and Validation

Ontologies, nowadays, play a primordial role in the representation, the re-use and the sharing of knowledge of a well given domain in a consensual and explicit way more precisely in the computing field. It is in this context that we have proposed a domain ontology baptised onto-computer-project which presents the key to our research goal. This essential goal is to arrive at a final step to elaborate a knowledge based system for computer projects reusing. The aimed system is essentially based on the construction of a memory projects. This memory projects could be defined as a collection of historical and achieved projects around the sphere of computer. This sphere is so wide including many subfields beginning at the database, software engineering fields and arriving at the fields of artificial intelligence, computer vision and so on. This research work requires at first to construct a well-defined ontology in the way to structure and to unify vocabulary often shared by multi actors in the domain of computer projects. To concretize this goal, our paper will describe a construction approach for the proposed domain ontology which is mainly based on an existing methodology named “methontology”. The proposed ontology construction approach, which is composed of seven steps, is the result of a comparative study between some ontology construction approaches belonging to different categories of methodology. In fact, we can distinguish four main categories of ontology development approaches: ontology construction approaches from zero, text-based construction approaches, building approaches based on the reuse of already existing ontologies, and crowd souring-based approaches. In our research work, we are interested by the approach of building ontology from zero. Indeed, the construction of the proposed ontology follows an autonomous approach which is not based on any other existing ontology or the updating of an already constructed ontology. In addition, in this paper we are interested by the problem of validating the content of domain ontology and in this context we have proposed an incremental approach for validating the proposed ontology which is composed of six steps. In this context we have studied some ontology validation approaches: those which are questionnaire based, others based on question answering. The problem here that all approaches studied are single actor approaches where a single validation actor can validate the entire ontology and this by applying the semantic and the structural validation definitively with no return. The main originality of our validation approach consists essentially of three criteria: the incremental validation, the multi-intervention, and the respecting of the “V” cycle. In fact, the passage from one validation step to another results in an update of the initial ontology and this by the intervention of three experts (project management expert, a project computer expert and a specialist in ontology engineering). Our proposal approach requires a feedback between all the validation phases and can return to any expert for revalidation if needed. The result of this research is improved a validated ontology which is allowed us to build our project memory and to feed our knowledge base which will serve us to develop our knowledge-based system.

A Methodology for Engineering Domain Ontology using Entity Relationship Model

Ontology engineering is an important aspect of semantic web vision to attain the meaningful representation of data. Although various techniques exist for the creation of ontology, most of the methods involve the number of complex phases, scenario-dependent ontology development, and poor validation of ontology. This research work presents a lightweight approach to build domain ontology using Entity Relationship (ER) model. Firstly, a detailed analysis of intended domain is performed to develop the ER model. In the next phase, ER to ontology (EROnt) conversion rules are outlined, and finally the system prototype is developed to construct the ontology. The proposed approach investigates the domain of information technology curriculum for the successful interpretation of concepts, attributes, relationships of concepts and constraints among the concepts of the ontology. The experts’ evaluation of accurate identification of ontology vocabulary shows that the method performed well on curriculum data with 95.75% average precision and 90.75% average recall.

VIS4ML: An Ontology for Visual Analytics Assisted Machine Learning.

While many VA workflows make use of machine-learned models to support analytical tasks, VA workflows have become increasingly important in understanding and improving Machine Learning (ML) processes. In this paper, we propose an ontology (VIS4ML) for a subarea of VA, namely "VA-assisted ML". The purpose of VIS4ML is to describe and understand existing VA workflows used in ML as well as to detect gaps in ML processes and the potential of introducing advanced VA techniques to such processes. Ontologies have been widely used to map out the scope of a topic in biology, medicine, and many other disciplines. We adopt the scholarly methodologies for constructing VIS4ML, including the specification, conceptualization, formalization, implementation, and validation of ontologies. In particular, we reinterpret the traditional VA pipeline to encompass model-development workflows. We introduce necessary definitions, rules, syntaxes, and visual notations for formulating VIS4ML and make use of semantic web technologies for implementing it in the Web Ontology Language (OWL). VIS4ML captures the high-level knowledge about previous workflows where VA is used to assist in ML. It is consistent with the established VA concepts and will continue to evolve along with the future developments in VA and ML. While this ontology is an effort for building the theoretical foundation of VA, it can be used by practitioners in real-world applications to optimize model-development workflows by systematically examining the potential benefits that can be brought about by either machine or human capabilities. Meanwhile, VIS4ML is intended to be extensible and will continue to be updated to reflect future advancements in using VA for building high-quality data-analytical models or for building such models rapidly.

Constituting Knowledge: German Literature and Philosophy Between Coleridge and Crabb Robinson

ABSTRACTSamuel Taylor Coleridge and Henry Crabb Robinson were their generation’s prime connoisseurs of German intellectual life. Both had lived and studied in Germany—Coleridge between 1798 and 1799, Robinson from 1800 to 1805. Similarly, albeit independent of each other, they took the step from English empiricism to Kant’s critical philosophy and beyond, towards idealist speculation. As Coleridge gained increasing notoriety for obscurity of thought and allegations of plagiarism, Robinson explained and defended his works publicly. How he did so, and the role that German philosophy and literature (in particular the works of C. L. Heyne and Jean Paul) played in this, is the topic of this essay. Robinson was uniquely qualified to interpret and disseminate Coleridge’s esoterica. From him, we learn how Coleridge placed the individual’s conscience at the heart of an idealist philosophy and subsequently elaborated the Will as the key concept of practical morality that also granted ontological validity to the affections. Ideas are constitutive, as opposed to regulative, in this process: they are the lively offshoots of a formative mind generating knowledge, not merely categorizers of worldly appearances. Literature emerges, between Coleridge and Robinson, as a compelling reflection on morals through the ideas’ involvement of the affections.

Temporal schema versioning in τOWL: a systematic approach for the management of time-varying knowledge

In this work, we consider the adoption of an OWL 2 ontology for the representation and management of time-varying knowledge. The W3C OWL 2 recommendation lacks explicit support for time-varying OWL ontologies. In previous work, we introduced τOWL which is an infrastructure and suite of tools to support the creation and validation of OWL ontologies with time-varying instances. In this paper, we extend τOWL to also support temporal versioning of the ontology schema. Schema versioning in the τOWL framework means that all the three components of a τOWL schema (i.e. conventional schema, logical and physical annotations) are versioned. In particular, we propose two complete sets of primitives, one for updating the conventional ontology schema and the other for managing the temporal ontology schema, and define their operational semantics. We also illustrate their use, through an example.

Towards natural language question generation for the validation of ontologies and mappings

BackgroundThe increasing number of open-access ontologies and their key role in several applications such as decision-support systems highlight the importance of their validation. Human expertise is crucial for the validation of ontologies from a domain point-of-view. However, the growing number of ontologies and their fast evolution over time make manual validation challenging.MethodsWe propose a novel semi-automatic approach based on the generation of natural language (NL) questions to support the validation of ontologies and their evolution. The proposed approach includes the automatic generation, factorization and ordering of NL questions from medical ontologies. The final validation and correction is performed by submitting these questions to domain experts and automatically analyzing their feedback. We also propose a second approach for the validation of mappings impacted by ontology changes. The method exploits the context of the changes to propose correction alternatives presented as Multiple Choice Questions.ResultsThis research provides a question optimization strategy to maximize the validation of ontology entities with a reduced number of questions. We evaluate our approach for the validation of three medical ontologies. We also evaluate the feasibility and efficiency of our mappings validation approach in the context of ontology evolution. These experiments are performed with different versions of SNOMED-CT and ICD9.ConclusionsThe obtained experimental results suggest the feasibility and adequacy of our approach to support the validation of interconnected and evolving ontologies. Results also suggest that taking into account RDFS and OWL entailment helps reducing the number of questions and validation time. The application of our approach to validate mapping evolution also shows the difficulty of adapting mapping evolution over time and highlights the importance of semi-automatic validation.

CAL: A Controlled Arabic Language for Authoring Ontologies

Authoring OWL ontologies is hard for both domain experts and ontology engineers unless they have good knowledge of mathematics and logic. Thus, controlled natural languages (CNLs) have been proposed for easier authoring of ontologies via statements that can be automatically translated to OWL. Unfortunately, most of these languages are controlled English languages. Though they typically allow using non-English identifiers for representing concepts, instances (of concepts), and relationships, keywords remain English. This makes statements awkward and both hard and slow to read and write. Besides, error messages are generated in English only. Thus, this paper proposes the first controlled Arabic language (CAL) for authoring ontologies using Arabic words only. CAL is accompanied by a tool to allow translating CAL statements to OWL. Detailed error messages are also generated in Arabic. Besides, CAL is based on and has a similar syntax as the controlled English language Rabbit, and thus, statements can be easily translated between both languages allowing the cooperation of Arabic-speaking and English-speaking domain experts and ontology engineers in ontology authoring and validation, a capability which is absent in other CNLs. The advantages of CAL have been empirically tested to support our claim regarding the need to develop a controlled language corresponding to each natural language other than English. Nevertheless, an additional layer, NCAL, allows developing ontologies in a more-natural CAL in comparison with CAL. Many linguistic challenges and specific features of the Arabic language have been considered when designing both CAL and NCAL.