Lightweight Community-Driven Ontology Evolution

Abstract

Abstract. Only few well-maintained domain ontologies can be found on the Web. The likely reasons for the lack of useful domain ontologies include that (1) informal means to convey intended meaning more efficiently are used for ontology specification only to a very limited extent, (2) many relevant domains of discourse show a substantial degree of conceptual dynamics, (3) ontology representation languages are hard to understand for the majority of (potential) ontology users and domain experts, and (4) the community does not have control over the ontology evolution. In this thesis, we propose to (1) ground a methodology for community-grounded ontology building on the culture and philosophy of wikis by giving users who have no or little expertise in ontology engineering the opportunity to contribute in all stages of the ontology lifecycle and (2) exploit the combination of human and computational intelligence to discover and resolve inconsistencies and align lightweight domain ontologies. The contribution of this thesis is a methodology and prototype for communitygrounded building and evolution of lightweight domain ontologies. Problem StatementEven though one can observe highly active research in the areas of ontologies and the Semantic Web, there is a lack of up-to-date domain ontologies for many fields. The complexity of reality makes building ontologies difficult in several ways: (1) Ontology engineering methodologies tend to focus on formal means for specifying ontologies. However, in order to describe the intended meaning of ontology elements, informal means are also needed. (2) Many relevant domains of discourse, such as ecommerce, show a high degree of conceptual dynamics, i.e. it is hard to keep up with the pace of change in reality [1]. (3) A prerequisite for using an ontology and thus committing to its view of the world is to be able to understand the meaning of concepts and relations [1]. This is problematic for many users, since they cannot easily figure out what they would be committing to when using a particular ontology file from the Web, as the discourse that lead to a certain specification is not available. (4) Most ontologies are built by a group of engineers and the user community does not have direct control over the evolution of the ontology. MotivationA community-oriented approach has several advantages as compared to an isolated engineering-oriented approach, where a small group of engineers carefully constructs

Peer Review #2 of "Collaboro: a collaborative (meta) modeling tool (v0.1)"

“…End-user involvement is a core feature of several software development methods (such as agile-based ones). The concept of community-driven development of a software product was introduced by Hess et al (2008) and other authors have studied this collaboration as part of the requirement elicitation (Mylopoulos et al, 1999), ontology development (Leenheer, 2009;Siorpaes, 2007) and modeling phases of the software (Hildenbrand et al, 2008;Lanubile et al, 2010;Whitehead, 2007;Rittgen, 2008), but neither of them focuses on the DSML language design process nor they present the collaboration as a process of discussion, voting and argumentation from the beginning to the end of the language development process. End-user participation is also the core of user-centered design (Norman and Draper, 1986), initially focused on the design of user interfaces but lately applied to other domains (e.g., agile methodologies (Hussain et al, 2009) or web development (Troyer and Leune, 1998)).…”

Collaborative ontology engineering: a survey

“…In collaborative ontology engineering, each member of the community can play several roles, depending on the types of contributions the respective individual is allowed to perform on the shared ontology, but also on the level of technology support in place and on the type of ontology that the project targets. Recent approaches to collaborative ontology engineering have in fact investigated the trade-offs between the level of expressivity of the ontology and the level of expertise predicated by the underlying formalization task, arguing for lightweight ontologies that are possibly less powerful with respect to the knowledge they can cover and the associated reasoning functionality, but whose development and maintenance can be undertaken by laymen (Siorpaes & Hepp, 2007).…”

“…Usability is one of the main concerns of myOntology system (Siorpaes & Hepp, 2007). To allow non-experts to participate in the process, myOntology focuses primarily on engineering lightweight ontologies, and implements several visualization techniques such as tag clouds and topic maps, and automatically builds links to Wikipedia and Flickr 26 for documentation purposes.…”

Semantic wiki-based ontology evolution

“…Thus to maintain an ontology, the ontology engineers would capture the changes of ontology and introduce the new version to users. This would take some time for the new ontology version to deliver to users and most likely the ontology would change again before the ontology has delivered [4,7]. The resolution to hindrance above mentioned is to involve users in the maintaining procedures.…”