Semantic similarity estimation from multiple ontologies

The estimation of semantic similarity between words is an important task in many language related applications. In the past, several approaches to assess similarity by evaluating the knowledge modelled in an ontology have been proposed. However, in many domains, knowledge is dispersed through several partial and/or overlapping ontologies. Because most previous works on semantic similarity only support a unique input ontology, we propose a method to enable similarity estimation across multiple ontologies. Our method identifies different cases according to which ontology/ies input terms belong. We propose several heuristics to deal with each case, aiming to solve missing values, when partial knowledge is available, and to capture the strongest semantic evidence that results in the most accurate similarity assessment, when dealing with overlapping knowledge. We evaluate and compare our method using several general purpose and biomedical benchmarks of word pairs whose similarity has been assessed by human experts, and several general purpose (WordNet) and biomedical ontologies (SNOMED CT and MeSH). Results show that our method is able to improve the accuracy of similarity estimation in comparison to single ontology approaches and against state of the art related works in multi-ontology similarity assessment.     

Web-Based Semantic Similarity: An Evaluation in the Biomedical Domain

Computation of semantic similarity between concepts is a very common problem in many language related tasks and knowledge domains. In the biomedical field, several approaches have been developed to deal with this issue by exploiting the structured knowledge available in domain ontologies (such as SNOMED-CT or MeSH) and specific, closed and reliable corpora (such as clinical data). However, in recent years, the enormous growth of the Web has motivated researchers to start using it as the corpus to assist semantic analysis of language. This paper proposes and evaluates the use of the Web as background corpus for measuring the similarity of biomedical concepts. Several ontology-based similarity measures have been studied and tested, using a benchmark composed by biomedical terms, comparing the results obtained when applying them to the Web against approaches in which specific clinical data were used. Results show that the similarity values obtained from the Web for ontology-based measures are at least and even more reliable than those obtained from specific clinical data, showing the suitability of the Web as information corpus for the biomedical domain.     

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.     

A semantic similarity method based on information content exploiting multiple ontologies

The quantification of the semantic similarity between terms is an important research area that configures a valuable tool for text understanding. Among the different paradigms used by related works to compute semantic similarity, in recent years, information theoretic approaches have shown promising results by computing the information content (IC) of concepts from the knowledge provided by ontologies. These approaches, however, are hampered by the coverage offered by the single input ontology. In this paper, we propose extending IC-based similarity measures by considering multiple ontologies in an integrated way. Several strategies are proposed according to which ontology the evaluated terms belong. Our proposal has been evaluated by means of a widely used benchmark of medical terms and MeSH and SNOMED CT as ontologies. Results show an improvement in the similarity assessment accuracy when multiple ontologies are considered.     

Determining semantic similarity among entity classes from different ontologies

Semantic similarity measures play an important role in information retrieval and information integration. Traditional approaches to modeling semantic similarity compute the semantic distance between definitions within a single ontology. This single ontology is either a domain-independent ontology or the result of the integration of existing ontologies. We present an approach to computing semantic similarity that relaxes the requirement of a single ontology and accounts for differences in the levels of explicitness and formalization of the different ontology specifications. A similarity function determines similar entity classes by using a matching process over synonym sets, semantic neighborhoods, and distinguishing features that are classified into parts, functions, and attributes. Experimental results with different ontologies indicate that the model gives good results when ontologies have complete and detailed representations of entity classes. While the combination of word matching and semantic neighborhood matching is adequate for detecting equivalent entity classes, feature matching allows us to discriminate among similar, but not necessarily equivalent entity classes.     

Ontology-based semantic similarity: A new feature-based approach

Estimation of the semantic likeness between words is of great importance in many applications dealing with textual data such as natural language processing, knowledge acquisition and information retrieval. Semantic similarity measures exploit knowledge sources as the base to perform the estimations. In recent years, ontologies have grown in interest thanks to global initiatives such as the Semantic Web, offering an structured knowledge representation. Thanks to the possibilities that ontologies enable regarding semantic interpretation of terms many ontology-based similarity measures have been developed. According to the principle in which those measures base the similarity assessment and the way in which ontologies are exploited or complemented with other sources several families of measures can be identified. In this paper, we survey and classify most of the ontology-based approaches developed in order to evaluate their advantages and limitations and compare their expected performance both from theoretical and practical points of view. We also present a new ontology-based measure relying on the exploitation of taxonomical features. The evaluation and comparison of our approach’s results against those reported by related works under a common framework suggest that our measure provides a high accuracy without some of the limitations observed in other works.     

Modeling Incomplete Knowledge of Semantic Web Using Bayesian Networks

ABSTRACT

Interoperable ontologies already exist in the biomedical field, enabling scientists to communicate with minimum ambiguity. Unfortunately, ontology languages, in the semantic web, such as OWL and RDF(S), are based on crisp logic and thus they cannot handle uncertain knowledge about an application field, which is unsuitable for the medical domain. In this paper, we focus on modeling incomplete knowledge in the classical OWL ontologies, using Bayesian networks, all keeping the semantic of the first ontology, and applying algorithms dedicated to learn parameters of Bayesian networks in order to generate the Bayesian networks. We use EM algorithm for learning conditional probability tables of different nodes of Bayesian network automatically, contrary to different tools of Bayesian networks where probabilities are inserted manually. To validate our work, we have applied our model on the diagnosis of liver cancer using classical ontology containing incomplete instances, in order to handle medical uncertain knowledge, for predicting a liver cancer.     

CNLs for the semantic web: a state of the art

One of the core challenges for building the semantic web is the creation of ontologies, a process known as ontology authoring. Controlled natural languages (CNLs) propose different frameworks for interfacing and creating ontologies in semantic web systems using restricted natural language. However, in order to engage non-expert users with no background in knowledge engineering, these language interfacing must be reliable, easy to understand and accepted by users. This paper includes the state-of-the-art for CNLs in terms of ontology authoring and the semantic web. In addition, it includes a detailed analysis of user evaluations with respect to each CNL and offers analytic conclusions with respect to the field.     

Ontology‐Based Representation and Modelling of Synthetic 3D Content: A State‐of‐the‐Art Review

An indispensable element of any practical 3D/VR/AR application is synthetic three‐dimensional (3D) content. Such content is characterized by a variety of features—geometry, structure, space, appearance, animation and behaviour—which makes the modelling of 3D content a much more complex, difficult and time‐consuming task than in the case of other types of content. One of the promising research directions aiming at simplification of modelling 3D content is the use of the semantic web approach. The formalism provided by semantic web techniques enables declarative knowledge‐based modelling of content based on ontologies. Such modelling can be conducted at different levels of abstraction, possibly domain‐specific, with inherent separation of concerns. The use of semantic web ontologies enables content representation independent of particular presentation platforms and facilitates indexing, searching and analysing content, thus contributing to increased content re‐usability. A range of approaches have been proposed to permit semantic representation and modelling of synthetic 3D content. These approaches differ in the methodologies and technologies used as well as their scope and application domains. This paper provides a review of the current state of the art in representation and modelling of 3D content based on semantic web ontologies, together with a classification, characterization and discussion of the particular approaches.     

Knowledge base grid: A generic grid architecture for semantic web

The emergence of semantic web will result in an enormous amount of knowledge base resources on the web. In this paper, a generic Knowledge Base Grid Architecture (KB-Grid) for building large-scale knowledge systems on the semantic web is presented. KB-Grid suggests a paradigm that emphasizes how to organize, discover, utilize, and manage web knowledge base resources. Four principal components are under development: a semantic browser for retrieving and browsing semantically enriched information, a knowledge server acting as the web container for knowledge, an ontology server for managing web ontologies, and a knowledge base directory server acting as the registry and catalog of KBs. Also a referential model of knowledge service and the mechanisms required for semantic communication within KB-Grid are defined. To verify the design rationale underlying the KB-Grid, an implementation of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is described.     

基于本体集成的语义标注模型设计

语义Web的全面实现需借助于语义标注,标注网页信息会涉及到多个本体.据此,通过研究桥本体,提出一个在本体集成的基础上建立起来的多本体语义标注模型.该模型利用桥本体集成顶层本体和多个领域本体,同时借助基于本体的信息抽取技术对网页进行语义标注,并将标注信息存入标注库,使标注信息与网页分离,提高语义检索的效率.通过举例说明了本模型的合理性.     

基于机器学习的本体概念相似性研究

现有的知识系统使用的是集中式的、一致性的、可扩充的Ontology库,不同本体间的语义匹配是语义网发展面临的最富挑战性的问题之一。本文针对领域中存在不同的Ontology的问题,讨论了一种基于多策略机器学习的Ontology匹配方法,重点分析了本体概念的相似度计算,并提出了一种相似度测量算法。     

基于IO与信息内容的语义Web服务发现

随着web服务数量大幅增长,如何快速准确的发现并满足用户需求的服务已经成为一个亟待解决的问题.现有的基于语义的web服务发现通常使用混合的方法,先在本体层面上进行语义匹配,当语义匹配失败的时候再采取其他的方法(基于关键字的匹配、基于结构分析)来弥补这个缺陷,在补救的过程当中由于现有的方法并未准确的反应两个概念之间的相似性,从而导致web服务的发现的准确率不高.将信息内容语义相似度计算的思想考虑在内,提出了采用基于服务的IO(input, output)语义匹配和基于信息内容语义相似计算相结合的方法,并以owls-tc2.0作为测试集合对该方法进行测试,实验结果表明该方法能有效提高服务发现的准确率.     

MD4：一种综合的跨本体实体语义相似度计算方法*

面向广域分布环境下信息资源共享与服务的需要,设计了基于本体的元数据模型,并在MD3模型的基础上给出了一种基于该元数据模型的跨本体的语义相似度计算方法——MD4模型。MD4充分利用本体对实体的描述信息,重点讨论了实体名称、实体属性、实体语义环境以及实体实例等相似度的计算,把MD3模型扩展到MD4模型,使得信息资源实体间语义相似度的计算更全面、精确。     

Extracting focused knowledge from the semantic web

Ontologies are increasingly being recognized as a critical component in making networked knowledge accessible. Software architectures which can assemble knowledge from networked sources coherently according to the requirements of a particular task or perspective will be at a premium in the next generation of web services. We argue that the ability to generate task-relevant ontologies efficiently and relate them to web resources will be essential for creating a machine-inferencable “semantic web”. The Internet-based multi-agent problem solving (IMPS) architecture described here is designed to facilitate the retrieval, restructuring, integration and formalization of task-relevant ontological knowledge from the web. There are rich structured and semi-structured sources of knowledge available on the web that present implicit or explicit ontologies of domains. Knowledge-level models of tasks have an important role to play in extracting and structuring useful focused problem-solving knowledge from these web sources. IMPS uses a multi-agent architecture to combine these models with a selection of web knowledge extraction heuristics to provide clean syntactic integration of ontological knowledge from diverse sources and support a range of ontology merging operations at the semantic level. Whilst our specific aim is to enable on-line knowledge acquisition from web sources to support knowledge-based problem solving by a community of software agents encapsulating problem-sloving inferences, the techniques described here can be applied to more general task-based integration of knowledge from diverse web sources, and the provision of services such as the critical comparison, fusion, maintenance and update of both formal informal ontologies.     

SVM-based ontology matching approach

There are a lot of heterogeneous ontologies in semantic web, and the task of ontology mapping is to find their semantic relationship. There are integrated methods that only simply combine the similarity values which are used in current multi-strategy ontology mapping. The semantic information is not included in them and a lot of manual intervention is also needed, so it leads to that some factual mapping relations are missed. Addressing this issue, the work presented in this paper puts forward an ontology matching approach, which uses multi-strategy mapping technique to carry on similarity iterative computation and explores both linguistic and structural similarity. Our approach takes different similarities into one whole, as a similarity cube. By cutting operation, similarity vectors are obtained, which form the similarity space, and by this way, mapping discovery can be converted into binary classification. Support vector machine (SVM) has good generalization ability and can obtain best compromise between complexity of model and learning capability when solving small samples and the nonlinear problem. Because of the said reason, we employ SVM in our approach. For making full use of the information of ontology, our implementation and experimental results used a common dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness of the mapping approach. It ensures the recall ration while improving the quality of mapping results.     

Algorithmic Computation and Approximation of Semantic Similarity

Automatic extraction of semantic information from text and links in Web pages is key to improving the quality of search results. However, the assessment of automatic semantic measures is limited by the coverage of user studies, which do not scale with the size, heterogeneity, and growth of the Web. Here we propose to leverage human-generated metadata—namely topical directories—to measure semantic relationships among massive numbers of pairs of Web pages or topics. The Open Directory Project classifies millions of URLs in a topical ontology, providing a rich source from which semantic relationships between Web pages can be derived. While semantic similarity measures based on taxonomies (trees) are well studied, the design of well-founded similarity measures for objects stored in the nodes of arbitrary ontologies (graphs) is an open problem. This paper defines an information-theoretic measure of semantic similarity that exploits both the hierarchical and non-hierarchical structure of an ontology. An experimental study shows that this measure improves significantly on the traditional taxonomy-based approach. This novel measure allows us to address the general question of how text and link analyses can be combined to derive measures of relevance that are in good agreement with semantic similarity. Surprisingly, the traditional use of text similarity turns out to be ineffective for relevance ranking.     

A Compact Co-Evolutionary Algorithm for sensor ontology meta-matching

With the proliferation of sensors, semantic web technologies are becoming closely related to sensor network. The linking of elements from semantic web technologies with sensor networks is called semantic sensor web whose main feature is the use of sensor ontologies. However, due to the subjectivity of different sensor ontology designer, different sensor ontologies may define the same entities with different names or in different ways, raising so-called sensor ontology heterogeneity problem. There are many application scenarios where solving the problem of semantic heterogeneity may have a big impact, and it is urgent to provide techniques to enable the processing, interpretation and sharing of data from sensor web whose information is organized into different ontological schemes. Although sensor ontology heterogeneity problem can be effectively solved by Evolutionary Algorithm (EA)-based ontology meta-matching technologies, the drawbacks of traditional EA, such as premature convergence and long runtime, seriously hamper them from being applied in the practical dynamic applications. To solve this problem, we propose a novel Compact Co-Evolutionary Algorithm (CCEA) to improve the ontology alignment’s quality and reduce the runtime consumption. In particular, CCEA works with one better probability vector (PV) \(PV_{better}\) and one worse PV \(PV_{worse}\), where \(PV_{better}\) mainly focuses on the exploitation which dedicates to increase the speed of the convergence and \(PV_{worse}\) pays more attention to the exploration which aims at preventing the premature convergence. In the experiment, we use Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) test cases and two pairs of real sensor ontologies to test the performance of our approach. The experimental results show that CCEA-based ontology matching approach is both effective and efficient when matching ontologies with various scales and under different heterogeneous situations, and compared with the state-of-the-art sensor ontology matching systems, CCEA-based ontology matching approach can significantly improve the ontology alignment’s quality.     

一种跨本体的语义相似度计算方法

针对在广域分布环境下进行信息共享与服务的需要,本文设计了基于本体的元数据模型,并在MD3模型的基础上给出了一种基于该元数据模型的跨本体的语义相似度计算方法.MD3模型是一种系统的跨本体概念间相似度的计算方法,这种方法无需建立一个集成的共享本体.在MD3模型的基础上,充分利用本体对概念的描述信息,重点讨论了跨本体概念间非层次关系相似度的计算,把MD3模型扩展到MD4模型,使得概念间相似度的计算理论上更全面、更精确.     

基于本体映射的多本体查询方法

随着语义网的发展,本体已经成为很多领域表达知识的主要手段。许多领域都根据自己的需求建立了本体来描述本领域内的知识。但是目前许多针对本体的语义查询只能对一个本体进行查询。为了实现一个查询能够对多个本体进行访问并且返回适当的查询结果,文中提出了一种利用本体映射实现对多本体的查询方法。其中的映射方法是一种基于语义的多策略结合方式。通过实验发现查询的速度与本体的数量基本呈线性关系且不会因为本体异构程度而增加。