Advances In Pattern Based Ontology Engineering

Ontologies are the corner stone of data modeling and knowledge representation, and engineering an ontology is a complex task in which domain knowledge, ontological accuracy and computational properties need to be carefully balanced. As with any engineering task, the identification and documentation of common patterns is important, and Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) provide ontology designers with a strong connection to requirements and a better communication of their semantic content and intent. This book, Advances in Pattern-Based Ontology Engineering, contains 23 extended versions of selected papers presented at the annual Workshop on Ontology Design and Patterns (WOP) between 2017 and 2020. This yearly event, which attracts a large number of researchers and professionals in the field of ontology engineering and ontology design patterns, covers issues related to quality aspects of ontology engineering and ODPs for data and knowledge representation, and is usually co-located with the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), apart from WOP 2020, which was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Topics covered by the papers collected here focus on recent advances in ontology design and patterns, and range from a method to instantiate content patterns, through a proposal on how to document a content pattern, to a number of patterns emerging in ontology modeling in various situations and applications. The book provides an overview of important advances in ontology engineering and ontology design patterns, and will be of interest to all those working in the field.

The study of patterns in the context of ontology engineering for the semantic web was pioneered more than a decade ago by Blomqvist, Sandkuhl and Gangemi. Since then, this line of research has flourished and led to the development of ontology design patterns, knowledge patterns, and linked data patterns: the patterns as they are known by ontology designers, knowledge engineers, and linked data publishers, respectively. A key characteristic of those patterns is that they are modular and reusable solutions to recurrent problems in ontology engineering and linked data publishing. This book contains recent contributions which advance the state of the art on theory and use of ontology design patterns. The papers collected in this book cover a range of topics, from a method to instantiate content patterns, a proposal on how to document a content pattern, to a number of patterns emerging in ontology modeling in various situations.

The use of ontologies for data and knowledge organization has become ubiquitous in many data-intensive and knowledge-driven application areas, in science, industry, and the humanities. At the same time, ontology engineering best practices continue to evolve. In particular, modular ontology modeling based on ontology design patterns is establishing itself as an approach for creating versatile and extendable ontologies for data management and integration. This book is the very first comprehensive treatment of Ontology Engineering with Ontology Design Patterns. It contains both advanced and introductory material accessible for readers with only a minimal background in ontology modeling. Some introductory material is written in the style of tutorials, and specific chapters are devoted to examples and to applications. Other chapters convey the state of the art in research regarding ontology design patterns. The editors and the contributing authors include the leading contributors to the development of ontology-design-pattern-driven ontology engineering.

Ontologies are formal knowledge models that describe concepts and relationships and enable data integration, information search, and reasoning. Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) are reusable solutions intended to simplify ontology development and support the use of semantic technologies by ontology engineers. ODPs document and package good modelling practices for reuse, ideally enabling inexperienced ontologists to construct high-quality ontologies. Although ODPs are already used for development, there are still remaining challenges that have not been addressed in the literature. These research gaps include a lack of knowledge about (1) which ODP features are important for ontology engineering, (2) less experienced developers' preferences and barriers for employing ODP tooling, and (3) the suitability of the eXtreme Design (XD) ODP usage methodology in non-academic contexts. This dissertation aims to close these gaps by combining quantitative and qualitative methods, primarily based on five ontology engineering projects involving inexperienced ontologists. A series of ontology engineering workshops and surveys provided data about developer preferences regarding ODP features, ODP usage methodology, and ODP tooling needs. Other data sources are ontologies and ODPs published on the web, which have been studied in detail. To evaluate tooling improvements, experimental approaches provide data from comparison of new tools and techniques against established alternatives. The analysis of the gathered data resulted in a set of measurable quality indicators that cover aspects of ODP documentation, formal representation or axiomatisation, and usage by ontologists. These indicators highlight quality trade-offs: for instance, between ODP Learnability and Reusability, or between Functional Suitability and Performance Efficiency. Furthermore, the results demonstrate a need for ODP tools that support three novel property specialisation strategies, and highlight the preference of inexperienced developers for template-based ODP instantiation---neither of which are supported in prior tooling. The studies also resulted in improvements to ODP search engines based on ODP-specific attributes. Finally, the analysis shows that XD should include guidance for the developer roles and responsibilities in ontology engineering projects, suggestions on how to reuse existing ontology resources, and approaches for adapting XD to project-specific contexts.

Modular ontology engineering is a methodology for producing highly reusable knowledge graph schema. Over the course of this dissertation, we outline a number of contributions that have improved the process to what we see today. These contributions fall within four categories: conveying meaning through schema diagrams, the composition of a modular ontology, the modular ontology engineering methodology, and modular graphical modeling. First, we created an improved method and tool for generating schema diagrams similar to those manually generated by humans and show that most of OWL, as it is used in real world ontologies, are expressible in this format. Next, we examined and improved the ontology design pattern development process. This was accomplished through the development of both patterns and modules, extensions to the ontology design pattern representation language, and a tool that significantly improves the usability of these annotations. This work culminated in MODL: a modular ontology design library, which is a distributable set of curated, well-documented ODPs, both novel and drawn from the ontology design pattern portal. These advances were combined, and building upon the state of the art, to create the Comprehensive Modular Ontology Design IDE (CoModIDE), which is a plugin for the industry-standard ontology editor, Protégé. Finally, as a culmination of the tool and the methodology, we evaluated CoModIDE, where it was shown to significantly improve outcomes for experienced and new ontology developers when developing modular ontologies. Altogether, these research topics, resulted in a methodology, that when executed, produced actually reusable, extendable, and adaptable ontologies.

Ontological Engineering refers to the set of activities that concern the ontology development process, the ontology life cycle, the methods and methodologies for building ontologies, and the tool suites and languages that support them. During the last decade, increasing attention has been focused on ontologies and Ontological Engineering. Ontologies are now widely used in Knowledge Engineering, Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science; in applications related to knowledge management, natural language processing, e-commerce, intelligent integration information, information retrieval, integration of databases, b- informatics, and education; and in new emerging fields like the Semantic Web. Primary goals of this book are to acquaint students, researchers and developers of information systems with the basic concepts and major issues of Ontological Engineering, as well as to make ontologies more understandable to those computer science engineers that integrate ontologies into their information systems. We have paid special attention to the influence that ontologies have on the Semantic Web. Pointers to the Semantic Web appear in all the chapters, but specially in the chapter on ontology languages and tools.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 21st International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2022, which took place in October 2022 in a virtual mode. The 48 full papers presented in this volume were thoroughly reviewed and selected from 239 submissions. They deal with the latest advances in fundamental research, innovative technology, and applications of the Semantic Web, linked data, knowledge graphs, and knowledge processing on the Web. Papers are organized in a research track, resources and in-use track. The research track details theoretical, analytical and empirical aspects of the Semantic Web and its intersection with other disciplines. The resources track promotes the sharing of resources which support, enable or utilize semantic web research, including datasets, ontologies, software, and benchmarks. And finally, the in-use-track is dedicated to novel and significant research contributions addressing theoretical, analytical and empirical aspects of the Semantic Web and its intersection with other disciplines. The chapters "Hashing the Hypertrie: Space- and Time-Efficient Indexing for SPARQL in Tensors", "Agree to Disagree: Managing Ontological Perspectives using Standpoint Logic", "GNNQ: A Neuro-Symbolic Approach to Query Answering over Incomplete Knowledge Graphs", "ISSA: Generic Pipeline, Knowledge Model and Visualization tools to Help Scientists Search and Make Sense of a Scientific Archiveare" are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This book contains the works connected with the key advances in Industrial Artificial Intelligence presented at IITI 2023, the Seventh International Scientific Conference on Intelligent Information Technologies for Industry held on September 25-30, 2023 in St. Petersburg, Russia. The works were written by the experts in the field of applied artificial intelligence including topics such as Machine Learning, Explainable AI, Decision-Making, Fuzzy Logic, Multi-Agent and Bioinspired Systems. The following industrial application domains were touched: railway automation, cyber security, intelligent medical systems, navigation and energetic systems. The editors believe that this book will be helpful for all scientists and engineers interested in the modern state of applied artificial intelligence.

An Introduction to Ontology Engineering introduces the student to a comprehensive overview of ontology engineering, and offers hands-on experience that illustrate the theory. The topics covered include: logic foundations for ontologies with languages and automated reasoning, developing good ontologies with methods and methodologies, the top-down approach with foundational ontologies, and the bottomup approach to extract content from legacy material, and a selection of advanced topics that includes Ontology-Based Data Access, the interaction between ontologies and natural languages, and advanced modelling with fuzzy and temporal ontologies. Each chapter contains review questions and exercises, and descriptions of two group assignments are provided as well. The textbook is aimed at advanced undergraduate/postgraduate level in computer science and could fi t a semester course in ontology engineering or a 2-week intensive course. Domain experts and philosophers may fi nd a subset of the chapters of interest, or work through the chapters in a different order. Maria Keet is an Associate Professor with the Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town, South Africa. She received her PhD in Computer Science in 2008 at the KRDB Research Centre, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy. Her research focus is on knowledge engineering with ontologies and Ontology, and their interaction with natural language and conceptual data modelling, which has resulted in over 100 peer-reviewed publications. She has developed and taught multiple courses on ontology engineering and related courses at various universities since 2009.

The Semantic Web is characterized by the existence of a very large number of distributed semantic resources, which together define a network of ontologies. These ontologies in turn are interlinked through a variety of different meta-relationships such as versioning, inclusion, and many more. This scenario is radically different from the relatively narrow contexts in which ontologies have been traditionally developed and applied, and thus calls for new methods and tools to effectively support the development of novel network-oriented semantic applications. This book by Suárez-Figueroa et al. provides the necessary methodological and technological support for the development and use of ontology networks, which ontology developers need in this distributed environment. After an introduction, in its second part the authors describe the NeOn Methodology framework. The book’s third part details the key activities relevant to the ontology engineering life cycle. For each activity, a general introduction, methodological guidelines, and practical examples are provided. The fourth part then presents a detailed overview of the NeOn Toolkit and its plug-ins. Lastly, case studies from the pharmaceutical and the fishery domain round out the work. The book primarily addresses two main audiences: students (and their lecturers) who need a textbook for advanced undergraduate or graduate courses on ontology engineering, and practitioners who need to develop ontologies in particular or Semantic Web-based applications in general. Its educational value is maximized by its structured approach to explaining guidelines and combining them with case studies and numerous examples. The description of the open source NeOn Toolkit provides an additional asset, as it allows readers to easily evaluate and apply the ideas presented.