Relationships and relata in ontologies and thesauri: Differences and similarities

Kless, Daniel; Milton, Simon K.; Kazmierczak, Edmund

doi:10.3233/ao-2012-0118

Cited by 11 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…that is, it is used in virtue of several entities (particulars and collections) that are distinguished in ontological realism. Figure 1 not only shows the relatedness of representational units in OWL 2 and relata in realism but also illustrates the correspondence between relata in realism and relata in thesauri that we argued for in Kless, Milton, and Kazmierczak (2012) and could confirm in our case study:…”

Section: Differences and Similarities In The Definition Of Relatasupporting

confidence: 70%

“…We visualized the similarities that we identified through mappings between structural elements in thesauri and ontologies. The mappings have parallels to the results of the theoretical comparison in Kless, Milton, and Kazmierczak (2012), which compared thesauri with a general framework of ontologies in realism. Realism, as we use the term here, is a worldview in philosophy.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 87%

“…In Kless, Milton, and Kazmierczak (2012), we demonstrated that the part-of relationships distinguished by Keet and Artale (2008) (e.g., "structural-part-of," "spatialpart-of," or "involved-in") form a basis for mapping to the hierarchical part-of relationship in thesauri. In our re-engineering case study, we learned that similar sets of relationships such as the ones defined in BioTop, a top-level domain ontology (Beisswanger et al, 2008;Schulz, 2012) are equally useful.…”

Section: Similaritymentioning

confidence: 86%

“…Our results are partially dependent on the definitions that we adopted from the realist framework described in Kless, Milton, and Kazmierczak (2012) and adopted from Bittner et al (2004) and Kuśnierczyk (2006). While many definitions in this framework appear to be generally accepted, the choice of a definitional framework and its association with modeling entities in OWL can influence the differences identified between thesauri and ontologies.…”

Section: Differences In the Validity Of Whole-part/part-of And Associmentioning

confidence: 94%

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Thesaurus and ontology structure: Formal and pragmatic differences and similarities

Kless

Milton

Kazmierczak

et al. 2014

Asso for Info Science & Tech

Self Cite

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Thesauri and other types of controlled vocabularies are increasingly re‐engineered into ontologies described using the Web Ontology Language (OWL), particularly in the life sciences. This has led to the perception by some that thesauri are ontologies once they are described by using the syntax of OWL while others have emphasized the need to re‐engineer a vocabulary to use it as ontology. This confusion is rooted in different perceptions of what ontologies are and how they differ from other types of vocabularies. In this article, we rigorously examine the structural differences and similarities between thesauri and meaning‐defining ontologies described in OWL. Specifically, we conduct (a) a conceptual comparison of thesauri and ontologies, and (b) a comparison of a specific thesaurus and a specific ontology in the same subject field. Our results show that thesauri and ontologies need to be treated as 2 orthogonal kinds of models with superficially similar structures. An ontology is not a good thesaurus, nor is a thesaurus a good ontology. A thesaurus requires significant structural and other content changes to become an ontology, and vice versa.

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Section: Differences and Similarities In The Definition Of Relatasupporting

confidence: 70%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 87%

Section: Similaritymentioning

confidence: 86%

Section: Differences In the Validity Of Whole-part/part-of And Associmentioning

confidence: 94%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Thesaurus and ontology structure: Formal and pragmatic differences and similarities

Kless

Milton

Kazmierczak

et al. 2014

Asso for Info Science & Tech

Self Cite

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show abstract

“…Thesauri and ontologies are KOS which can be used to organize knowledge from a community. Even though serious efforts have been made to obtain ontologies from thesauri and other KOS [19], there are relevant differences between ontologies and thesauri [20,21]. These differences are enough to justify the existence of a Semantic Web standard, SKOS, specifically designed to represent KOS in the Semantic Web context [3].…”

Section: Background and Purposementioning

confidence: 99%

The support of constructs in thesaurus tools from a Semantic Web perspective: Framework to assess standard conformance

González

Díez

2019

Computer Standards & Interfaces

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Thesauri are conceptual tools useful to achieve semantic interoperability and reusability, which are relevant goals in the Semantic Web. Thesaurus standards establish, among other issues, the constructs that can appear in a thesaurus. The ISO 25964 standard for thesauri, which supersedes ISO 2788, is the evolution of the ISO thesauri standard to a conceptual approach closer to the Semantic Web. However, it appeared when SKOSthe W3C Recommendation-was already consolidated as the standard for KOS (Knowledge Organization System) representation in the Semantic Web, including thesauri. The evolution from ISO 2788 to ISO 25964, and the relationships between constructs in ISO 2788/ISO 25964 and SKOS, are studied in this paper. From the analysis of this comparison, a methodological framework, that focuses on the construct support, is proposed to evaluate the conformance quality of thesaurus management tools. Target readers are professionals in charge of thesauri edition. A Semantic Web perspective is taken to characterize the effect that using SKOS to represent thesauri can have on the results of the assessment. A proof of concept for the model's feasibility was performed on two tools and the analysis of the results of this experimental validation is presented. The conclusions highlight the model's suitability for assessing conformance to the standards concerning support for thesaurus constructs.

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Formal Ontologies in Biomedical Knowledge Representation

Schulz

Jansen²

2013

Yearb Med Inform

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SummaryObjectives: Medical decision support and other intelligent applications in the life sciences depend on increasing amounts of digital information. Knowledge bases as well as formal ontologies are being used to organize biomedical knowledge and data. However, these two kinds of artefacts are not always clearly distinguished. Whereas the popular RDF(S) standard provides an intuitive triple-based representation, it is semantically weak. Description logics based ontology languages like OWL-DL carry a clear-cut semantics, but they are computationally expensive, and they are often misinterpreted to encode all kinds of statements, including those which are not ontological. Method: We distinguish four kinds of statements needed to comprehensively represent domain knowledge: universal statements, terminological statements, statements about particulars and contingent statements. We argue that the task of formal ontologies is solely to represent universal statements, while the non-ontological kinds of statements can nevertheless be connected with ontological representations. To illustrate these four types of representations, we use a running example from parasitology. Results: We finally formulate recommendations for semantically adequate ontologies that can efficiently be used as a stable framework for more context-dependent biomedical knowledge representation and reasoning applications like clinical decision support systems.

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Relationships and relata in ontologies and thesauri: Differences and similarities

Cited by 11 publications

References 22 publications

Thesaurus and ontology structure: Formal and pragmatic differences and similarities

Thesaurus and ontology structure: Formal and pragmatic differences and similarities

The support of constructs in thesaurus tools from a Semantic Web perspective: Framework to assess standard conformance

Formal Ontologies in Biomedical Knowledge Representation

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