CFinder: An intelligent key concept finder from text for ontology development

Key concept extraction is a major step for ontology learning that aims to build an ontology by identifying relevant domain concepts and their semantic relationships from a text corpus. The success of ontology development using key concept extraction strongly relies on the degree of relevance of the key concepts identified. If the identified key concepts are not closely relevant to the domain, the constructed ontology will not be able to correctly and fully represent the domain knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel method, named CFinder, for key concept extraction. Given a text corpus in the target domain, CFinder first extracts noun phrases using their linguistic patterns based on Part-Of-Speech (POS) tags as candidates for key concepts. To calculate the weights (or importance) of these candidates within the domain, CFinder combines their statistical knowledge and domain-specific knowledge indicating their relative importance within the domain. The calculated weights are further enhanced by considering an inner structural pattern of the candidates. The effectiveness of CFinder is evaluated with a recently developed ontology for the domain of ‘emergency management for mass gatherings’ against the state-of-the-art methods for key concept extraction including—Text2Onto, KP-Miner and Moki. The comparative evaluation results show that CFinder statistically significantly outperforms all the three methods in terms of F-measure and average precision.     

JOINT: Java ontology integrated toolkit

In the past few years, the use of ontologies for creating more intelligent and effective application has increased considerably. This growth is due to the fact that ontologies attempt to provide semantics to the data consumed by machines so that they can reason about this data. However, developing complex ontology-based applications is still difficult and time-consuming because the existing tools do not provide a simple and unified environment for developers. Most of these tools only provide data manipulation using RDF triples, complicating the development of applications that need to work with the object orientation paradigm. Furthermore, tools that provide instances manipulation via object orientation do not support features such as manipulating ontologies, reasoning over rules or querying data with SPARQL. In this context, this work proposes a framework and a tool for supporting the efficient development of ontology-based applications through the integration of existing technologies. Furthermore, we also define a methodology to use this tool efficiently. In order to evaluate the benefits of our work, a controlled experiment with eight developers (unfamiliar with ontologies) was performed to compare the proposed tool, JOINT, with another one, Jastor/Jena, frequently used by the community. The results suggest that our tool helps novice developers to create ontology-based applications faster and with few errors in the code. In addition, a real educational application with 10 ontologies, more than 200 ontology concepts (classes) and more than a million triples is already using the proposed tool successfully.     

A holistic approach to collaborative ontology development based on change management

This paper describes our methodological and technological approach for collaborative ontology development in inter-organizational settings. It is based on the formalization of the collaborative ontology development process by means of an explicit editorial workflow, which coordinates proposals for changes among ontology editors in a flexible manner. This approach is supported by new models, methods and strategies for ontology change management in distributed environments: we propose a new form of ontology change representation, organized in layers so as to provide as much independence as possible from the underlying ontology languages, together with methods and strategies for their manipulation, version management, capture, storage and maintenance, some of which are based on existing proposals in the state of the art. Moreover, we propose a set of change propagation strategies that allow keeping distributed copies of the same ontology synchronized. Finally, we illustrate and evaluate our approach with a test case in the fishery domain from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). The preliminary results obtained from our evaluation suggest positive indication on the practical value and usability of the work here presented.     

Crossing the chasm between ontology engineering and application development: A survey

The adoption of Knowledge Graphs (KGs) by public and private organizations to integrate and publish data has increased in recent years. Ontologies play a crucial role in providing the structure for KGs, but are usually disregarded when designing Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to enable browsing KGs in a developer-friendly manner. In this paper we provide a systematic review of the state of the art on existing approaches to ease access to ontology-based KG data by application developers. We propose two comparison frameworks to understand specifications, technologies and tools responsible for providing APIs for KGs. Our results reveal several limitations on existing API-based specifications, technologies and tools for KG consumption, which outline exciting research challenges including automatic API generation, API resource path prediction, ontology-based API versioning, and API validation and testing.     

BiOSS: A system for biomedical ontology selection

In biomedical informatics, ontologies are considered a key technology for annotating, retrieving and sharing the huge volume of publicly available data. Due to the increasing amount, complexity and variety of existing biomedical ontologies, choosing the ones to be used in a semantic annotation problem or to design a specific application is a difficult task. As a consequence, the design of approaches and tools addressed to facilitate the selection of biomedical ontologies is becoming a priority. In this paper we present BiOSS, a novel system for the selection of biomedical ontologies. BiOSS evaluates the adequacy of an ontology to a given domain according to three different criteria: (1) the extent to which the ontology covers the domain; (2) the semantic richness of the ontology in the domain; (3) the popularity of the ontology in the biomedical community. BiOSS has been applied to 5 representative problems of ontology selection. It also has been compared to existing methods and tools. Results are promising and show the usefulness of BiOSS to solve real-world ontology selection problems. BiOSS is openly available both as a web tool and a web service.     

基于界面设计模式的界面开发工具综述*

良设计的界面可为用户提供方便易用的服务,增强应用在市场上的竞争力。使用可复用的界面设计模式,旨在提高设计的可用性和效率。界面开发的复杂性需要有工具支持。针对现有基于模式的界面开发工具,本文根据它们对不同开发阶段的支持进行分类,然后对各类工具进行探讨,从形式、功能、可用性等特征展开分析和比较,最后,本文讨论了目前工具存在的不足及未来的研究方向。     

An ontology change management approach for facility management

Facility management (FM) or technical property management is an approach to operate, maintain, improve and adapt buildings and infrastructures of organizations. A FM project requires the cooperation of many actors from different domains so it has to be automated in a constrained collaborative environment. This paper proposes a new approach for ontology change management applied on facility management of such projects. The industrial challenge is, firstly, to ensure consistency of a FM project knowledge from the construction phase to the technical property management phase (after delivery). Secondly, it has to provide to each actor of the project a personal up-to-date “view” of the building knowledge related to its business profile and allow its evolution. The scientific approach, called OntoVersionGraph, is a change management methodology for managing ontology life cycle including ontology evolution and versioning features, in conjunction with contextual view modeling. Its contribution is the impact management of changes between the ontology and its different views.     

Reusing ontology mappings for query routing in semantic peer-to-peer environment

To efficiently support automated interoperability between ontology-based information systems in distributed environments, the semantic heterogeneity problem has to be dealt with. To do so, traditional approaches have acquired and employed explicit mappings between the corresponding ontologies. Usually these mappings can be only obtained from human domain experts. However, it is too expensive and time-consuming to collect all possible mapping results on distributed information systems. More seriously, as the number of systems in a large-scale peer-to-peer (P2P) network increases, the efficiency of the ontology mapping is exponentially decreased. Thereby, in this paper, we propose a novel semantic P2P system, which is capable of (i) sharing and exchanging existing mappings among peers, and (ii) composing shared mappings to build a certain path between two systems. Given two arbitrary peers (i.e., source and destination), the proposed system can provide indirect ontology mappings to make them interoperable. In particular, we have focused on query-based communication for evaluating the proposed ontology mapping composition system. Once direct ontology mappings are collected from candidate peers, a given query can be (i) segmented into a set of sub-queries, and (ii) transformed to another query. With respect to the precision performance, our experimentation has shown an improvement of about 42.5% compared to the keyword-based query searching method.     

Neverlang: A framework for feature-oriented language development

Reuse in programming language development is an open research problem. Many authors have proposed frameworks for modular language development. These frameworks focus on maximizing code reuse, providing primitives for componentizing language implementations. There is also an open debate on combining feature-orientation with modular language development. Feature-oriented programming is a vision of computer programming in which features can be implemented separately, and then combined to build a variety of software products. However, even though feature-orientation and modular programming are strongly connected, modular language development frameworks are not usually meant primarily for feature-oriented language definition. In this paper we present a model of language development that puts feature implementation at the center, and describe its implementation in the Neverlang framework. The model has been evaluated through several languages implementations: in this paper, a state machine language is used as a means of comparison with other frameworks, and a JavaScript interpreter implementation is used to further illustrate the benefits that our model provides.     

An ontology of slums for image-based classification

Information about rapidly changing slum areas may support the development of appropriate interventions by concerned authorities. Often, however, traditional data collection methods lack information on the spatial distribution of slum-dwellers. Remote sensing based methods could be used for a rapid inventory of the location and physical composition of slums. (Semi-)automatic detection of slums in image data is challenging, owing to the high variability in appearance and definitions across different contexts. This paper develops an ontological framework to conceptualize slums using input from 50 domain-experts covering 16 different countries. This generic slum ontology (GSO) comprises concepts identified at three levels that refer to the morphology of the built environment: the environs level, the settlement level and the object level. It serves as a comprehensive basis for image-based classification of slums, in particular, using object-oriented image analysis (OOA) techniques. This is demonstrated by with an example of local adaptation of GSO and OOA parameterization for a study area in Kisumu, Kenya. At the object level, building and road characteristics are major components of the ontology. At the settlement level, texture measures can be potentially used to represent the contrast between planned and unplanned settlements. At the environs level, factors which extend beyond the site itself are important indicators, e.g. hazards due to floods plains and marshy conditions. The GSO provides a comprehensive framework that includes all potentially relevant indicators that can be used for image-based slum identification. These characteristics may be different for other study areas, but show the applicability of the developed framework.     

CroMatcher: An ontology matching system based on automated weighted aggregation and iterative final alignment

In order to perform ontology matching with high accuracy, while at the same time retaining applicability to most diverse input ontologies, the matching process generally incorporates multiple methods. Each of these methods is aimed at a particular ontology component, such as annotations, structure, properties or instances. Adequately combining these methods is one of the greatest challenges in designing an ontology matching system. In a parallel composition of basic matchers, the ability to dynamically set the weights of the basic matchers in the final output, thus making the weights optimal for the given input, is the key breakthrough for obtaining first-rate matching performance. In this paper we present CroMatcher, an ontology matching system, introducing several novelties to the automated weight calculation process. We apply substitute values for matchers that are inapplicable for the particular case and use thresholds to eliminate low-probability alignment candidates. We compare the alignments produced by the matchers and give less weight to the matchers producing mutually similar alignments, whereas more weight is given to those matchers whose alignment is distinct and rather unique. We also present a new, iterative method for producing one-to-one final alignment of ontology structures, which is a significant enhancement of similar non-iterative methods proposed in the literature. CroMatcher has been evaluated against other state-of-the-art matching systems at the OAEI evaluation contest. In a large number of test cases it achieved the highest score, which puts it among the state-of-the-art leaders.     

流程导向的新产品开发领域本体构建方法研究

分析了新产品开发领域的特点,基于对现有本体构建方法的分析和改进,结合基于本体的知识检索,提出了流程导向的新产品开发领域本体构建方法。该过程分为原型展示、本体详细构建、本体进化三个阶段。重点对该方法的过程进行了详细阐述。最后,对流程导向的新产品开发本体构建方法进行了评述。     

OntoTrack: A semantic approach for ontology authoring

OntoTrackis an ontology authoring tool that combines a graph-based hierarchical layout and instant reasoning feedback within one single view. Currently OntoTrack can handle ontologies with an expressivity almost comparable to OWL Lite. The graphical representation provides an animated and zoomable subsumption graph with context sensitive features such as click-able miniature branches or selective detail views, together with drag-and-drop editing. Each editing step is instantly synchronised with an external reasoner in order to provide appropriate graphical feedback about relevant modeling consequences. A recent extention of OntoTrack provides an on-demand textual explanation for subsumption relationships between classes. This paper describes the key features of the current implementation and discusses future work, as well as some development issues. OntoTrack can be downloaded at http://www.informatik.uni-ulm.de/ki/ontotrack/.     

An ontology in OWL for legal case-based reasoning

The paper gives ontologies in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) for Legal Case-based Reasoning (LCBR) systems, giving explicit, formal, and general specifications of a conceptualisation LCBR. Ontologies for different systems allows comparison and contrast between them. OWL ontologies are standardised, machine-readable formats that support automated processing with Semantic Web applications. Intermediate concepts, concepts between base-level concepts and higher level concepts, are central in LCBR. The main issues and their relevance to ontological reasoning and to LCBR are discussed. Two LCBR systems (AS-CATO, which is based on CATO, and IBP) are analysed in terms of basic and intermediate concepts. Central components of the OWL ontologies for these systems are presented, pointing out differences and similarities. The main novelty of the paper is the ontological analysis and representation in OWL of LCBR systems. The paper also emphasises the important issues concerning the representation and reasoning of intermediate concepts.

Using Bayesian decision for ontology mapping

Ontology mapping is the key point to reach interoperability over ontologies. In semantic web environment, ontologies are usually distributed and heterogeneous and thus it is necessary to find the mapping between them before processing across them. Many efforts have been conducted to automate the discovery of ontology mapping. However, some problems are still evident. In this paper, ontology mapping is formalized as a problem of decision making. In this way, discovery of optimal mapping is cast as finding the decision with minimal risk. An approach called Risk Minimization based Ontology Mapping (RiMOM) is proposed, which automates the process of discoveries on 1:1, n:1, 1:null and null:1 mappings. Based on the techniques of normalization and NLP, the problem of instance heterogeneity in ontology mapping is resolved to a certain extent. To deal with the problem of name conflict in mapping process, we use thesaurus and statistical technique. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method can significantly outperform the baseline methods, and also obtains improvement over the existing methods.     

Aondê: An ontology Web service for interoperability across biodiversity applications

Biodiversity research requires associating data about living beings and their habitats, constructing sophisticated models and correlating all kinds of information. Data handled are inherently heterogeneous, being provided by distinct (and distributed) research groups, which collect these data using different vocabularies, assumptions, methodologies and goals, and under varying spatio-temporal frames. Ontologies are being adopted as one of the means to alleviate these heterogeneity problems, thus helping cooperation among researchers. While ontology toolkits offer a wide range of operations, they are self-contained and cannot be accessed by external applications. Thus, the many proposals for adopting ontologies to enhance interoperability in application development are either based on the use of ontology servers or of ontology frameworks. The latter support many functions, but impose application recoding whenever ontologies change, whereas the first supports ontology evolution, but for a limited set of functions.This paper presents Aondê—a Web service geared towards the biodiversity domain that combines the advantages of frameworks and servers, supporting ontology sharing and management on the Web. By clearly separating storage concerns from semantic issues, the service provides independence between ontology evolution and the applications that need them. The service provides a wide range of basic operations to create, store, manage, analyze and integrate multiple ontologies. These operations can be repeatedly invoked by client applications to construct more complex manipulations. Aondê has been validated for real biodiversity case studies.     

A systematic review of tools,languages, and methodologies for mashup development

Web 2.0 has become a powerful means of transmitting information in a number of fields, such as communication, e‐commerce, and entertainment. Nowadays, companies and organizations transmit specific information through different mechanisms, such as Web feeds and Web services. These data sources enable third parties to incorporate data from service providers into their own applications. On the basis of this understanding, mashups have emerged as a new approach to develop applications and which combine data and resources from heterogeneous sources—such as internal data sources, Web feeds, screen scraping, and Web services—with the aim of solving specific needs. Mashup development involves activities such as accessing heterogeneous sources, combining data from different data sources, and building graphical interfaces. These activities restrict the development of these kinds of applications only to experienced computer users. Today, a number of tools and programming languages are used to help carry out some of the aforementioned activities. These tools and programming languages have features enabling the integration of different technologies in order to solve problems such as data management from different data sources and content publication. If this is taken into account, there is a growing need to learn about the features, advantages, and disadvantages of these tools and programming languages in order to select the tool or language that best fits a specific need and a specific level of knowledge and experience in terms of software development. This paper presents a systematic review and analysis of the tools, programming languages, and software development methodologies involved in mashup development in order to learn more about the features and services provided by mashups. Furthermore, this research also explains the qualitative and quantitative evaluation used for the mashup development tools. The evaluation was performed in order to measure not only the usability of these tools but also the support that they provide for standardized features of Web development that they provide. Finally, new trends in the development of mashups are discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On institutions for modular coalgebraic specifications

We present an algebraic extension of standard coalgebraic specification techniques for state-based systems which allows us to integrate constants and n-ary operations in a smooth way and which leads to institutions enabling the use of modular specification techniques. A sound and complete proof system for first-order observational properties of modular specifications is given. The framework of (Ω,Ξ)-structures that we present can be considered as the result of a transformation of concepts of observational logic as in Hennicker and Bidoit (in: A. Haeberer (Ed.), Algebraic Methodology and Software Technology (AMAST’98), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1548, Springer, Berlin, 1999) into the coalgebraic world. Moreover, it is shown that the features of (Ω,Ξ)-structures that make them suitable models for an observational approach to specifications can be categorically expressed by the fact that the operation mapping an (Ω,Ξ)-structure to its behaviour is a fibred idempotent monad.