A survey on units ontologies: architecture, comparison and reuse

Abstract

Purpose With the increasing spread of ontologies in various domains, units have gradually become an essential part of ontologies and units ontologies have been developed to offer a better expression ability for the practical usage. From the perspectives of architecture, comparison and reuse, the purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey on four mainstream units ontologies: quantity-unit-dimension-type, quantities, units, dimensions and values, ontology of units of measure and units ontology (UO) of the open biomedical ontologies, in order to address well the state of the art and the reuse strategies of the UO. Design/methodology/approach An architecture of units ontologies is presented, in which the relations between key factors (i.e. units of measure, quantity and dimension) are discussed. The criteria for comparing units ontologies are developed from the perspectives of organizational structure, pattern design and application scenario. Then, the authors compare four typical units ontologies based on the proposed comparison criteria. Furthermore, how to reuse these units ontologies is discussed in materials science domain by utilizing two reuse strategies of partial reference and complete reference. Findings Units ontologies have attracted high attention in the scientific domain. Based on the comparison of four popular units ontologies, this paper finds that different units ontologies have different design features from the perspectives of basis structure, units conversion and axioms design; a UO is better to be applied to the application areas that satisfy its design features; and many challenges remain to be done in the future research of the UO. Originality/value This paper makes an extensive review on units ontologies, by defining the comparison criteria and discussing the reuse strategies in the materials domain. Based on this investigation, guidelines are summarized for the selection and reuse of units ontologies.

A review of data mining ontologies

“…The study carefully investigated the literature where ontologies were reviewed or compared based on parameters, like Mascardi et al (2007), Vilches-Blázquez et al (2009), Zhang et al (2017), Liu et al (2013), Prantner et al (2007), Dong et al (2008) and Sinha and Dutta (2020). Based on these investigations, a set of parameters was extracted (detailed in the next section) and used to compare the DMO.…”

“…Thus, Vilches-Blázquez et al (2009) compared three hydrographical ontologies based on features sources used: reliability of building approaches, ontology richness, formalization language, granularity and the design criteria followed. Similarly, Zhang et al (2017) presented the architecture of four mainstream unit's ontologies and then compared them based on structural organization, pattern design and application areas. Meriah and Rabai (2019) conducted a comparative analysis of six significant ontologies focusing on using ISO/IEC 27000 series security specifications based on parameters, such as aim, security principles and ISO 27000 features.…”

Marketplace-Level Domain Ontologies

“…• vivo:unit: a unit that can be expressed as a scalar multiple of an algebraic combination of SI units. This concept is the same as emmo-metrology:ReferenceUnit and qudt:Unit [15,16,34].…”

“…Domain: vivo:assertion; range: vivo:unit. • vivo:is_quantity_kind points to the physical property characterization following QUDT [34]. Domain: vivo:assertion; range: qudt:QuantityKind.…”

Reliable and interoperable computational molecular engineering: 2. Semantic interoperability based on the European Materials and Modelling Ontology

“…Further triples can provide more information, e.g., on the size parameter of the Mie interaction sites, which is here specified to be σ = 2.5764 Å: Therein, the entity representing the unit Å is obtained from the system of ontologies for quantities, units, and datatypes (QUDT) [48].…”